10M Pills Seized in 10 Months, Almost all Keptagon
Yemen seizes ten million drugs capsules in 8 months
Security sources said on Sunday that Interior Ministry seized about 1400000 capsules of drugs since the beginning of 2008. The sources added that the latest operation of capturing drugs was done in the Aden harbor, where about 3500000 capsules of drugs were found inside water heaters imported from a neighbor country. The source pointed out that investigations are underway with the smugglers.
Last week, the security forces in Hodeidah province held a Syrian citizen charged with smuggling 1.212 million captagon pills into the country. The seizure comes after the security forces seized a large amount of captagon pills concealed in water heaters shipped in a container and after they found large quantities of hashish on two cars.
Due to its technological development under communism,
Bulgarian criminals have had an advantage in synthetic
drugs production. They are best known for production
of Kaptagon (fenethylline), a synthetic stimulant prized
in the Middle East for its alleged aphrodisiacal qualities.
Today, most pills sold as Kaptagon are, in fact, forms
of amphetamine that are easier to produce, but large
quantities of these counterfeits are regularly seized.
There have also been reports of false Kaptagon being
produced in Turkey, destined largely for markets in the
Middle East. According to Europol:
… amphetamine tableted with the ‘captagon’ logo is produced
on a substantial scale in Bulgaria for the domestic
market as well as for the export to Turkey and Middle
East countries such as Saudi Arabia. More than 900 kg
of amphetamine were seized in Bulgaria in 2006, the
majority on its way to Turkey. Moreover, Turkey reported
the seizure of nine amphetamine production, storage
and tableting sites detected in its territory plus more than
fourteen million amphetamine / ‘captagon’ tablets as well
as 65 kg of BMK. According to Bulgarian information this
production is controlled by Bulgarian organised crime.189
But the potential for synthetic drug production exists in
other countries as well, such as Serbia.
