Saudi Arabia authorities stop attempts to smuggle in over 650,000 pills

Saudi Arabia said it thwarted three attempts to smuggle in hundreds of thousands of captagon pills into the kingdom, according to Saudi daily Okaz.

The Saudi Customs Authority said it stopped three different attempts to smuggle in drugs including a total of 651,909 captagon pills found hidden in containers and trucks which came in through different entry points, Okaz reported Tuesday.

فيديو | الكاتب السياسي د. نايف الوقاع: المخدرات حرب عالمية محرمة شرعا ومجرمة نظاما وعقوبتها في المملكة شديدة وما نشاهده من عمليات إحباط تؤكد أن هدف التهريب إلى المملكة ليس ماديا وإنما لإفساد الشباب وتعطيل خطط التنمية#الحرب_على_المخدرات#نشرة_النهار#الإخبارية pic.twitter.com/O8BjL1LwAB

— قناة الإخبارية (@alekhbariyatv) June 6, 2023

Saudi authorities first stopped the smuggling of 93,750 pills of an unnamed drug which came in through the port town of Duba on the Red Sea.

In the second attempt, Jeddah Islamic Port Customs thwarted efforts to smuggle 356,559 pills found hidden within various goods in a container.

The Haditha customs authority on the Jordanian border thwarted the smuggling of 201,600 captagon pills.

Seven people were arrested in connection with the attempted smuggling, the Saudi Customs Authority said.

It did not reveal which country the drugs came from or the nationalities of those arrested.

Saudi Arabia is the world's biggest captagon market. The kingdom's customs body seized 119 million pills of the amphetamine in 2021 alone.

Saudi officers thwarted an attempt to smuggle 47 million amphetamine pills into the country in August 2022, in what authorities said was the largest ever drug trafficking operation in the kingdom.

The kingdom metes out extremely severe punishments for drugs offences, with many offenders facing the death penalty.

War-torn Syria is believed to be the biggest producer and exporter of captagon.

Saudi Arabia and other countries in the region have pressed the Syrian regime to put a stop to the drug smuggling.