Cairo: Saudi anti-drug police have rounded up 14 people involved in narcotics peddling and smuggling in several parts of the country.
The kingdom’s General Directorate of Narcotics Control said it had arrested seven Bangladeshi residents in Riyadh for dealing in 3.3kg of the highly addictive stimulant Methamphetamine, 12,432 tablets of amphetamine and an unspecified amount of hashish.
The directorate also arrested two Syrian nationals and a Saudi citizen in the port city of Jeddah for peddling 21,000 tablets of amphetamine.
In a separate raid, police had detained an expatriate and a Saudi citizen for dealing in 75,600 tablets of amphetamine in the Saudi city of Medina while border guard patrols arrested in the south-western region of Jizan two Ethiopian violators of the kingdom’s border rules for attempting to smuggle 40kg of the illicit qat stimulant substance.
In recent months, Saudi Arabia has intensified its crackdown on narcotics smugglers and traffickers in what is dubbed the “war on drugs,” reporting a series of foiled attempts.
Earlier this month, the Saudi Zakat, Tax and Customs Authority (Zatca) reported that customs inspectors at the Jeddah port had foiled an attempt to smuggle 3,633,978 captagon pills hidden in a shipment.
In May, Saudi anti-drug police had seized 4.7 million tablets of amphetamine hidden in a consignment of concrete blocks and arrested two foreigners in connection with the haul.
That month, customs authorities said they had thwarted an attempt to smuggle cocaine into the kingdom in a potato shipment arriving at the Jeddah port. Drug smuggling and trafficking are offenses punishable by up to death in Saudi Arabia.`
