More than 20 Ministry of Interior and provincial police stormed a house
in Pursat province yesterday, seizing nearly four tonnes of safrole oil, the
biggest such cache uncovered this year, police said.
Safrole oil, a precursor to the
production of MDMA, commonly known as ecstasy, was stored in 114 barrels in a
dilapidated house in Veal Veng district occupied by Vietnamese-Cambodian Keo
Thou, 29, who was arrested during the crackdown, district police chief Sam Some
Oun said.
“Our police had been watching him
for about one month before the raid,” Some Oun said, adding that 26 police
officers had descended on the property at 6:30am yesterday.
Thou, who had long been suspected
by local police of being involved in the illegal trade of safrole oil, was held
for questioning last night.
Police were unsure whether he was
working alone or had accomplices, Some Oun said, though it was suspected the
safrole oil barrels were ultimately headed for Phnom Penh.
Officials also found machinery
and large, heated vats to distill safrole oil not far from the house in the
jungle at the base of the Cardamom mountain range that dominates the Veal Veng
landscape.
Safrole oil can be illegally
cooked in makeshift jungle stills by boiling the roots of trees in the
sassafras family, which grow in the Cardamoms and along the Thai-Cambodia
border.
On May 11, several people were
arrested and more than 3,000 litres of safrole oil – enough to manufacture 30
million tablets of ecstasy – were seized during raids on six drug-producing
sites in the capital.
According to Phnom Penh municipal
police, who led that crackdown, investigators found the confiscated safrole had
been imported by drug dealers across the porous Cambodian-Thai border.
Pursat provincial police chief
Sarun Chanthy said yesterday’s raid had been the biggest safrole-oil bust this
year.
“There is a government
prohibition on refining or trading safrole oil. However, a number of suspects
are still disobeying this prohibition despite a series of crackdowns,” Chanthy
said.
Experts and anti-drug officials
would examine the cache in coming days to determine whether it was being primed
for illegal drug production, he said.
Pursat province Adhoc
co-ordinator Phoung Sothea said the production of safrole oil in the jungle was
difficult to crack down on, given the terrain of the Cardamoms.
“These suspects go deep into the
jungle to find the location of [the sassafras trees],” Sothea said, adding that
it was hardly ever Cambodians behind these operations, but more commonly
Vietnamese drug traffickers.
Phak Seangly
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