DAMASCUS —
Syrian authorities announced on
Tuesday they had seized 24kg of captagon that had been crushed and
reconstituted to look like hummus bowls.
اضافة اعلان
The amphetamine is produced in pill form but these
smugglers had crushed it and used the resulting paste to “mold pottery-like
dishes coated with a brown adhesive”, the interior ministry said.
One man was arrested in
Damascus in connection with
the thwarted trafficking attempt, the statement said, without specifying where
the shipment of fake hummus bowls was bound for.
Captagon traffickers have in recent years found ever
more imaginative places in which to conceal their drug, from fake oranges to
real hollowed-out pomegranates and pitted olives.
They have purposely manufactured various ornamental
objects or construction equipment with cavities holding pills that can only be
retrieved at the other end by smashing their handiwork.
By manufacturing objects with the amphetamine powder
itself, the traffickers are taking a leaf out of the
Latin American drug
cartels’ book.
Cocaine in its harder-to-detect liquid form in
particular can be used to soak anything from plywood to T-shirts and retrieved
once it reaches its destination.
Most of global captagon production originates in
Syria, spurring a multibillion-dollar industry that has made the drug the
country’s largest export by far.
According to an AFP tally, around 250 million
captagon pills were seized worldwide in the first eight months of 2022.
Read more Region and World
Jordan News
.jpg)
.jpg)
