Thai drug arrest seizes 10,100 amphetamine pills near Sangkhalaburi, Thailand

July 12th, 2010

IMNA : Thai authorities have made the largest drug bust in Kanchanaburi Province, Thailand this year. The arrest came after a week of heightened security and manning checkpoints for 24 hrs a day.

On July 9th, Thai authorities reported seizing nearly 10,100 amphetamine pills that were being smuggled from Burma to Thailand, and arrested the carrier Friday morning near Sangkhalaburi, Thailand.

A source close to Thai authorities said, “according to [their] investigation he is the only carrier [involved in this bust] and that it is his second time [smuggling drugs over the border]. He is a member of a group that smuggles drugs.” After the arrest the smuggler was sent to a Police station in Kanchanaburi Province for booking.

The accused, Nai Mix, an ethnic Karen, is from Three Pagoda Pass (TPP) Township, Karen State, near the Thai/Burma border and possessed a fake Thai ID card.

The Human Rights Foundation of Monland (HURFOM) noted in their 2008 report, Protecting their rice pots the frequently with which TPP is used as a portal for drug smuggling as well as other illegal trade.

One Thai official announced, “The defendant said he accepted about 65,000 baht for carrying [pills] at one time”. He was arrested while carrying the amphetamines in his motorbike,.

Nai Mix was arrested on the way to Kanchanaburi Province carrying the amphetamine pills in his motorbike, a Wave 100 (N0- 514), after acting noticeably strange when being routinely stopped at the check point near Lantee Chaung (Lantee river). Thai Immigration police, army, and people’s militia had been manning the checkpoint 24 hours a day.

The current arrest and seizer of pills is the largest of its kind in Sangkhalaburi this year.

The Thai/Burma border is well known to be a broad route thorough which a wide variety of drugs pass into more economically stable Thailand. Earlier this year on May 9th, IMNA reported on the instance in which 10 members of the pro-junta ceasefire group, Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA), were arrested with 90,000 amphetamine pills smuggled from the border town of Mae Sot to Bangkok.

Thai authorities have assumed that seized amphetamine was coming from the Three Pagoda Pass (TPP) area and believe the 10,100 pills to be connected with, as they described a, “Karen peace group”.

The arrests come only shortly after the United Nation’s Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) highlighted in their latest world drug report a massive increase in amphetamine production in northern Burma.