52 kilometre car chase for suspects with millions of meth pills in South Thailand

Highway Police were sent on a wild goose chase in South Thailand this week in a mission to catch three drug suspects.

The police reported on Wednesday that they had chased a car from the Lang Suan district of Chumphon province, all the way to Than Chana district in Surat Thani province, totalling 52 kilometres.

The police found two million meth pills in the car. The driver, 21 year old Naris ‘Petch’ Petchkam, admitted to police that he had planned to deliver the pills to a woman in Nakhon Si Thammarat, another southern province.

He also admitted that he has been paid 40,000 baht for each time he has transported drugs. He claimed that he had successfully transported drugs twice before.

The three suspects now face charges of illegal possession of Category 1 drug, and police are continuing to investigate the driver’s connections.

This news comes after a series of other meth busts across Thailand, notably in Phuket in the last month. Police seized 69,182 meth pills in a crackdown in Phuket and seven upper southern provinces from August 22-26. The upper southern provinces that police raided were: Krabi, Chumphon, Nakhon Si Thammarat, Phang Nga, Phuket, Ranong, and Surat Thani. The police also seized 1,083 grammes of crystal meth.

Meth continues to be the most popular, cheap, and readily available illicit narcotic in Thailand and all of Southeast Asia, where the synthetic drug trade is booming.

Last year alone, more than one billion meth pills were seized in east and Southeast Asia, according to a report released by the United Nations. It is considered the “drug of greatest concern” in the region by the UN.

In April, Thai police arrested more than 120,000 drug suspects in the past six months. They had seized more than 2.4 billion baht in assets and confiscated more than 260 million pills of illegal substances, including meth.

SOURCE: The Phuket Express | The Phuket Express