Heroin smuggling attempt foiled in Aqaba

AMMAN – Anti-Narcotics Department (AND) agents have foiled an attempt by a drug gang to smuggle 60 kilogrammes of heroin from the port city of Aqaba to a neighbouring country using a boat, police said Tuesday. 

A statement issued by the Public Security Department (PSD) media office said three of the gang’s five members were arrested, one of them an Arab national, while a search is still under way for the other two suspects.

Anti-Narcotics Department (AND) personnel were collecting information on activities related to drug smuggling when they discovered that a group of suspects was preparing a large quantity of narcotics to be smuggled out of the Kingdom, the statement said. 

The AND team identified the suspects and monitored them for nearly a month, the PSD statement said, adding that they headed to Aqaba and hid the drugs in fuel containers before loading them on a boat. 

Officers raided the site and found large quantities of heroin, estimated at 60 kilos, according to the statement.

The PSD media office posted several pictures of the drugs on its Facebook page. 

The statement did not specify the destination country of the smugglers.

Last December, AND agents arrested two Jordanians who were attempting to smuggle 38 kilogrammes of heroin into a neighbouring country. An official source, who described the haul as “one of our biggest busts in recent years”, told The Jordan Times that the value of one kilogramme of heroin in the local market is estimated at JD18,000.