SUKHOTHAI, June 9 — Police in Thailand’s northern province of Sukhothai, in a jointly operation with highway police, arrested two suspected members of a drug syndicate and siezed one million of methamphetamine pills with an estimated value of Bt300 million on a highway at Si Satchanalai district.
Sukhothai provincial police and Highway Police had earlier set up a checkpoint at Mae Sam sub-district for regular screening of illegal activities and while they inspected a suspicious car with a Bangkok registration plate, a pickup truck with a Phayao registration plate had quickly turned back just before arriving at the checkpoint.
The police called supporting teams for help and found the pickup some five kilometres from the checkpoint, but its driver had left the vehicle and fled into a nearby cornfield.
Searching the abandoned vehicle, police found one million tightly packaged methamphetamine pills with an estimated street value of Bt300 million.
Police believed the first car was a advance team to clear the checkpoint before telephoning their associates in the pickup to avoid arrest. They detained two suspects in the first car for further investigation.
In another incident, police in the northern province of Chiang Rai seized 10,000 methamphetamine pills in the toilet of a Chiang Rai-Bangkok bus.
No one was arrested during the police operation which was a regular screening for drug trafficking.
Police said that while searching the bus, they found a suspicious package in the onboard bus toilet and found 10,000 methamphetamine pills inside.
The officers believed that drug dealers were trying to smuggle the methamphetamine pills to deliver them in Bangkok and to avoid arrest, they had hidden them in the toilet.
The package will be sent for expert fingerprint identification, which may lead to the arrest of the drug dealers. (MCOT online news)
