Train-riding teens held in B10m meth bust

Hua Hin -- Three teenagers, one a minor, were arrested and methamphetamine pills with a street value of 10 million baht seized by police on a southbound train on Wednesday.

The 19 year-old male and two girls, aged 18 and 16, were detained shortly after the Bangkok-Sungai Kolok express train No. 37 they were travelling on stopped at Hua Hin station. A team of railway police boarded the train and found more than 56,000 meth pills, or ya ba, in two travel bags in the overhead storage racks.

The teens, from a southern province, were travelling from Bangkok to Sungai Kolok district of Narathiwat. According to police, they admitted that the bags belonged to them, but claimed they did not know there were drugs inside.

Some of the drugs seized in the past week, worth 277 million baht, are shown to the media at the Narcotics Suppression Bureau on Wednesday. (Photo by Pattarapong Chatpattarasill)

Pol Col Surapong Thanomjit, acting commander of Railway Police, said he did not believe them. Two of the detained youths had tested positive for drug use.

Pol Col Surapong said police were acting on a tip-off that smugglers would use the No. 37 train to move a consignment of drugs to the South.

The youngsters were being investigated further, to identify more people involved.

Latest statistics released by the Office of the Narcotics Control Board show a total of 62,979 drug traffickers and couriers were arrested in 2014, and 15.6% of them were aged under 20.

The Narcotics Suppression Bureau also announced it had seized an assortment of drugs worth a combined 277 million baht with five major arrests in Bangkok and other provinces in the past week.

The confiscated substances included two million meth pills, 13 kg of crystal meth, known as ya ice, and 26,4000 bottles of cough syrup, the key ingredient used to produce the drug cocktail known as “4x100”, plus 18 kg of kratom leaves, also used in the cocktail.



