South Korea's intelligence agency arrested and deported an international drug trafficker who had distributed massive quantities of narcotics over the past 25 years, acting on a request from the Thai government.
The National Intelligence Service (NIS) said Monday that it apprehended T, a 43-year-old Thai national and head of an international drug organization, at a hotel in Seoul's Gangnam district the previous day. The arrest came after Thailand's Office of the Narcotics Control Board (ONCB) made an urgent request for his capture. T was deported to Thailand on Monday morning, the NIS said. The operation was conducted jointly with the Ministry of Justice and the police.
According to the ONCB, T distributed 11.5 tons of methamphetamine, 271 million tablets of yaba (a synthetic drug), 5 tons of ketamine, and other narcotics across Thailand and multiple countries over the past 25 years. The volume is unprecedented for a single criminal organization, the NIS said.
The methamphetamine alone was enough for 380 million individual doses, with a domestic street value of 4.6 trillion won ($3.4 billion). The amount is 30 times the total volume of methamphetamine seized in South Korea last year, which stood at 376 kilograms.
The yaba volume exceeded last year's domestic seizure of 124 kilograms by more than 732 times. The ketamine distribution volume was approximately 35 times last year's domestic seizure of 140 kilograms, enough for 100 million individual doses, the NIS said.
The arrest was made possible through close international cooperation between Korean and Thai authorities.
The operation began when the Bangkok branch chief of the ONCB informed the NIS's International Crime Intelligence Center that T had entered South Korea. Immediately after receiving Thailand's cooperation request, the government formed a dedicated task force on May 28 comprising the NIS, the Ministry of Justice, and the police. The team then began tracking T's movements.
After confirming that T had entered the country legally using a third-country passport and was staying in Gangnam, the task force arrested him at 2 a.m. on June 6, the NIS said.
The Thai government had issued up to 50 arrest warrants for T over the past 10 years. However, he had continued his criminal activities while evading law enforcement, according to the NIS.
The NIS explained that the government assembled the dedicated task force for this operation because Thai authorities, including the ONCB and police, have actively cooperated with Korea's efforts to block Southeast Asian drug inflows and crack down on scam organizations.
"This is a model case of international cooperation, where we swiftly arrested a major drug trafficker through organic collaboration based on the trust we have built with Thailand's ONCB, combined with coordination among our government agencies," an NIS official said.