Judicial authorities yesterday said they had cooperated with Malaysian police to break a drug smuggling ring, leading to the arrest of 10 suspects in Malaysia.
Wu Shih-hsien (吳世賢), a counter-narcotics official at the Ministry of Justice’s Investigation Bureau, told a press conference that agents from the bureau and Malaysian police broke up a smuggling ring in which Taiwanese and Malaysian drug smugglers exchanged different drugs between the countries.
Wu said a Chinese Malaysian man surnamed Yeh, who was suspected of procuring ketamine from China and India, had managed to bring the drug into Taiwan via Malaysia.
The ketamine was delivered by air express to a Taiwanese woman surnamed Lee, Wu said, adding that Lee and her family produced Erimin and sold it to Yeh.
The official said that while ketamine is popular in Taiwan, Erimin is selling well in Malaysia.
Lee, who opened a restaurant in Kuala Lumpur to provide a cover for her drug smuggling operations, shipped Erimin to Malaysia as cargo, claiming the delivery involved chairs and tables for her restaurant, Wu said.
A few months ago, Lee purchased 60 plastic mannequins in Taichung, which alerted agents to the possibility that she might be preparing for another drug shipment.
After agents determined that Lee had shipped the mannequins to Kuala Lumpur in a cargo box on July 22, which was expected to arrive at Kuala Lumpur’s Kelang Port earlier this month, they notified Malaysian police, Wu said.
Lee, her boyfriend, her daughter and her daughter’s boyfriend were heading to Kuala Lumpur on Aug. 8 to pick up the shipment at the harbor.
Malaysian police launched their operation last Thursday. In the raid, police seized a total of 500,000 Erimin pills in the mannequins and 345,000 more in a warehouse used by Yeh. Police also seized 15kg of ketamine in the warehouse, which was reportedly ready for shipment to Lee in Taiwan.
Yeh, four Malaysians, Lee, three of her family members and a man from Singapore were arrested in the crackdown, Wu said.
The drugs seized have a street value of about NT$30 million (US$100,000), he said.
Ketamine and Erimin are mostly sold in nightclubs in both countries, the official said.
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read: