News Desk
COLOMBO — The plan, such as it was, required a 40-year-old man to board a flight from Male’, conceal 602 grams of methamphetamine in his underwear, land at one of South Asia’s busier international airports, walk past a narcotics unit that had been tipped off about him specifically, collect his bag, and hand the drugs to a distributor waiting in a Colombo hotel.
It did not go well.
Sri Lanka’s Police Narcotics Bureau had received intelligence before the man even boarded. By the time his flight touched down at Bandaranaike International Airport on 22 July, officers from PNB headquarters were already positioned at the baggage carousel in the arrivals terminal, which is precisely the kind of place you do not want narcotics police to be when you are walking through with drugs taped to your body.
The 40-year-old was arrested on the spot. A search revealed two packets of ice, wrapped in adhesive tape, tucked inside his underwear beneath a pair of long trousers. The concealment method, which police noted was intended to evade airport security, had the unfortunate quality of being exactly the kind of thing narcotics officers look for when they are looking for something.
He told police, once the conversation reached that point, that he was carrying the drugs to hand over to a major distributor operating in Sri Lanka. This was useful information. It was also the end of the network’s evening.
Acting on what the courier had shared, officers drove to a hotel in Colombo the same night and arrested a 28-year-old Maldivian man believed to be that distributor. He had 10 grams and 670 milligrams of ice on him at the time of arrest, which is enough to confirm a hypothesis but not quite enough to suggest the operation had been particularly well planned at any stage.
The two men appeared before the Negombo Magistrate’s Court on Thursday. Both were remanded for 14 days. The PNB said the pair are suspected of involvement in a wider drug trafficking network operating across Sri Lanka. The combined seizure is valued at around 10 million Sri Lankan rupees.
The Maldives has a serious and well-documented drug problem, one that successive governments have acknowledged, addressed in speeches, and struggled to contain in practice. Methamphetamine, known locally as ice, has become the drug of choice in recent years, having largely displaced heroin in terms of street prevalence. The trade moves through the islands with a persistence that law enforcement has found difficult to interrupt, and it does not stay within the Maldives. As this case illustrates, it travels.
What is striking about the Colombo arrest is not that it happened. Drug couriers get caught at airports. What is striking is the apparent confidence of the operation. A man carrying over 600 grams of methamphetamine on his person, on a scheduled commercial flight, to a country where police had been tipped off about his arrival, suggests either a very high risk tolerance or a very low assessment of the likelihood of getting caught.
Sri Lankan police, on this occasion, were waiting at the carousel.
Both men remain in custody. The investigation continues. Somewhere between Male’ and Colombo, a network that presumably believed it had a workable system is now taking stock of where things went wrong.
The underwear, at least, is no longer a factor.
PS:
The two men arrested have been identified as Mohamed Shafy bin Ahmed, 28, of H. Palmeira, Male’, and Hassan Abdullah, 40, of Niru, N. Landhoo.
