According to the Australian Federal Police (AFP), the Canadian citizen Tse Chi Lop was detained at the Schipol International Airport in Amsterdam on Friday, who took the lead in an extensive international investigation. Prior to his arrest, Tse was one of the world’s most sought-after refugees.
“The importance of the arrest of Tse cannot be underestimated. It is great and has been for a long time,” said Jeremy Douglas, the local representative of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Ocean, said.
The organization is accused of running a synthetic medicine empire in large parts of Myanmar’s jungled jungles, a region plagued by civil war and still under the control of various rival armies and militias – conditions which makes it easy to hide industrial-scale drug manufacturing operations from law enforcement.
From there, Sam Gor could allegedly purchase large quantities of precursor chemicals, the ingredients for the manufacture of synthetic drugs, and then transport them through the region to the nearby markets in Bangkok, but also to those further afield in Australia and Japan, by law. enforcement said.
Sam Gor allegedly had jobs all over the world, with players in South Korea, England, Canada and the United States, according to an information session on the syndicate that an official with direct knowledge of the investigation shared with CNN.
In the documents, Sam Gor is described as a ‘tripartite network’ – a reference to ethnic Chinese gangs operating in Asia and North America – but more mobile and dynamic. The group’s existence was revealed in 2016 after a Taiwanese drug dealer was arrested in Yangon, Myanmar.
Further police investigations have revealed that the organization will earn between $ 8 billion and $ 17.7 billion in illegal revenue per year from 2018, according to the briefing. The organization uses casinos that are poorly regulated in Southeast Asia to launder a significant portion of the proceeds.
According to AFP, a warrant has been issued for the arrest of Tse in 2019 in connection with an operation aimed at Sam Gor.
“The syndicate has targeted Australia over a number of years, importing and distributing large quantities of illicit drugs, laundering profits abroad and living off the wealth gained from crime,” AFP said in a statement.
Dutch police spokesman Thomas Aling said Tse was expected to be extradited after appearing before a judge. Authorities in the Netherlands could not provide details about the lawsuit and it was not clear whether Tse had a lawyer.
This is not Tse’s first run-up to law enforcement. Tse pleaded guilty in 2000 to drug charges in the United States and was sentenced to nine years in prison. Details surrounding the case are limited because it is still sealed, but the source said he was released in 2006 and returned to Canada before moving to Hong Kong.
While Douglas of the UNODC praised the arrest of Tse, he said more needs to be done to ensure that drug lords cannot take advantage of the poor government oversight of the areas in Myanmar and Laos.
“While syndicate leadership issues are being abolished, the conditions they have effectively used in the region to do business remain, and the network remains in place,” he said. “A lot of difficult information is coming out soon.”