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Published : 18 Jan 2016, 08:49 AM
Three people have been detained.
RAB claims one of those arrested is the kingpin of a drug-peddling racket.
This is the biggest haul of Yaba tablets in a single day in Bangladesh.
The elite force’s legal and media wing issued a press release on Monday.
According to their PR department, RAB 7 got a tip-off that a Bangladesh-Myanmar drug gang would smuggle in a huge consignment of Yaba tablets packed as fish products.
RAB located two nameless trawlers in Bangladeshi waters in the Bay on Friday, and started chasing them the next day. The trawlers separated to throw off the RAB vessel, which then chased one, and finally caught up with it near Patenga.
A few of the trawler crew managed to escape by jumping into the sea.
RAB found 2.75 million Yaba tablets on searching the captured trawler, and arrested two of the crew, identified as Hamid Ullah and Ali Ahammad, said the PR department.
Based on information procured from Ali and Hamid, RAB raided a place near Dhaka airport on Monday and found another 50,000 Yaba tablets in the possession of a man named Mohiuddin.
RAB claims that Ali Ahammad used his real-estate development company called Ekushey Properties as a front for his Yaba smuggling business, and that Mohiuddin and Hamid were his assistants.
“A Myanmar citizen named Bomonk is the main supplier of these Yaba tablets. Ali’s syndicate bought the drugs from him, and shipped the consignments to Chittagong with the help of a syndicate run by a Myanmar national named Ayatullah,” the PR department said.
Drug peddling gangs have been smuggling Yaba tablets into Bangladesh from Myanmar using the sea route for a long time. The tablets are then transported to different parts of the country from Chittagong.
The American party drug named Yaba is very popular with transportation company workers in south-east Asia. The first Yaba shipment to be seized by RAB in Bangladesh was in 2007.
The Bangladesh Navy found and confiscated 1.5 million tablets from a trawler in Chittagong port in February last year. Several big consignments have also been seized along the Cox’s Bazar to Dhaka route via Chittagong.
RAB says that it has seized a total of 9.2 million Yaba tablets between 1st January 2015 and 18th January 2016.
