Vietnamese police seized a total of 270 kilograms of ketamine, including 90 kilograms concealed in pig innards, from a Taiwanese-led transnational drug trafficking ring which had been using GPS tracking to monitor their transport operations.
The seizure was reported at a meeting hosted by the Ministry of Public Security’s Drug Crime Investigation Police Department in Hanoi on Thursday to review the department’s performance during the first half of 2021.
The ring was led by a group of Taiwanese nationals who had been living in Ho Chi Minh City, said Major General Nguyen Van Vien, director of the department.
The department was tipped off about the crime ring by Taiwanese law enforcement who said that several Vietnamese in Cambodia had been colluding with a syndicate in Vietnam to traffic drugs from there to Ho Chi Minh City before shipping them out of the country by road and air, the major general said.
On May 19, a police team pulled over a car transporting 10 kilograms of ketamine stashed inside boxes of instant noodles in the city’s Binh Tan District.
Officers then arrested two Taiwanese nationals who had been preparing to receive the shipment for delivery to a third country.
The two Taiwanese told police that another Taiwanese national, Huang Yen Sheng, had hired them to transport the drugs.
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| In this supplied photo, drugs were found hidden in pig organs at a factory in Hanoi. |
Working off testimony from those in custody, authorities raided a warehouse belonging to a transport company in Binh Chanh District, where they discovered 150 kilograms of drugs hidden in five electric motors, each weighing one ton, which were being prepared for transport to Hanoi.
Meanwhile, during a search of a 300-square-meter factory that Huang had been renting in Hanoi’s Thuong Tin District, police found dozens of kilograms of drugs stashed inside pig organs awaiting delivery to China.
Members of the drug ring had portioned out 90 kilograms of ketamine and concealed them in the abdomens of 900 pigs.
They then fixed a positioning device onto the shipment in order to monitor it during transport.
Another search of an apartment rented by Huang in Hanoi’s Long Bien District led to the discovery of five positioning systems intended to monitor drugs during the transport process.
Police have so far arrested five members of the ring and discovered that it had successfully delivered 270 kilograms of ketamine hidden in three outbound shipments since the beginning of the year.
As the ring’s masterminds are now in China and Cambodia, Vietnamese police are coordinating with counterparts in those countries to continue their investigations, Major General Vien said.
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