More than 1.5 metric tons of illegal narcotics bound for Taiwan were seized by Cambodian authorities in Phnom Penh and Sihanoukville, and five Chinese and Taiwanese nationals were being held on drug smuggling charges, a top national police official told Radio Free Asia.
The drugs – mostly methamphetamine and the hallucinogenic drug Ketamine – had been transported into Cambodia one small shipment at a time and were stored at three locations ahead of a planned shipment by sea to Taiwan, the deputy national police commissioner in charge of drug crimes, Lt. Gen. Mak Chito, said on Thursday.
The suspects were being detained at the Ministry of Interior’s Anti-Drug Department while investigators gathered more evidence, he said.
“The formalities have not yet been completed because there are many people and there is a lot of questioning,” Mak Chito said. “We are not finished, and we are doing more research. We are asking for an arrest warrant for the remaining people.”
One of the three locations where drugs was stored was in Phnom Penh’s Kambol district, he said. The other two were in Sihanoukville, a coastal resort town that has seen a rise in criminality in recent years amid extensive Chinese development.
Chinese law enforcement agencies have recently intensified their cooperation with Southeast Asian counterparts to address the scourge in transnational crime, money laundering, illicit drug production, human trafficking and cyber scams.
‘Red notice’
Mak Chito told RFA that there could be more arrests in the case.
Cambodian authorities will send out a “red notice” arrest warrant to ask for international cooperation in finding other suspects, he said.
As methamphetamine use surged in Cambodia in 2022, NGOs called on the government to enact tougher measures against Chinese drug lords operating in the country.
The calls came just after the arrest in Sihanoukville of seven Chinese nationals who had set up a factory to make methamphetamine from smuggled ingredients.
More than 10,000 suspects faced drug-related charges last year in Cambodia as police confiscated about 4 tons of drugs and more than 1 ton of drug ingredients, according to the National Authority for Combating Drugs.
But this week’s arrests show that drug traffickers can still transport large amounts of drugs into the country because of ineffective law enforcement and courts, said Ros Sotha, executive director at the Cambodian Human Rights Action Coalition.
“The lack of effectiveness in taking legal action on the drugs issue is due to corruption. Corruption, as we know, is related to powerful officials,” he said. “I hope action can be taken to deal with more corrupt people and drug traffickers.”
Translated by Sok Ry Sum. Edited by Matt Reed.