According to the Australian Federal Police (AFP), which has taken the lead in an extensive international investigation, Canadian citizen Tse Chi L was detained on Friday at Schiphol International Airport in Amsterdam. Before his arrest, Tse was one of the world’s most wanted fugitives.
“The importance of the arrest of Tse cannot be underestimated. It is great and it took a long time,” said Jeremy Douglas, the regional representative of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. .
The organization is accused of leading a synthetic drug-manufacturing empire in much of the under-controlled jungles of Myanmar, a region marred by civil war and still under the control of several competing warlords and militias – conditions that make it easy to industrialize. – Scaling-up of law enforcement drug production.
From there, Sam Gor has reportedly been able to purchase large quantities of precursor chemicals, the ingredients to make synthetic drugs, and then transport them across the region to nearby markets in Bangkok, as well as more distant markets in Australia and Japan, law enforcement said.
Sam Gor reportedly had agents working around the world, with players in South Korea, England, Canada and the United States, according to a syndicate briefing shared with CNN by an official with direct knowledge of the investigation.
In the documents, Sam Gor was described as a “triad-like 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 trafficker was arrested in Yangon, Myanmar, the briefing revealed.
Further police investigation found that as of 2018, the organization was making between $ 8 billion and $ 17.7 billion in illegal proceeds per year, according to the briefing. The organization uses poorly regulated casinos in Southeast Asia to launder a significant portion of that revenue.
AFP said a warrant was issued in 2019 for the arrest of Tse in connection with an operation against Sam Gor.
“The syndicate focused on Australia for a number of years, importing and distributing large quantities of illegal narcotics, laundering the profits abroad and living off the wealth obtained from crime,” AFP said in a statement.
Dutch police spokesperson Thomas Aling said Tse is expected to be extradited after appearing in court. The authorities in the Netherlands were unable to provide details of the legal proceedings and it was not clear whether Tse had a lawyer.
This isn’t Tse’s first meeting with law enforcement. Tse pleaded guilty to narcotics charges in the United States in 2000 and was sentenced to nine years in prison. Details on the case are limited as it is still sealed, but the source said he was released in 2006 and returned to Canada before moving to Hong Kong.
While praising the arrest of Tse, Douglas of the UNODC said more needs to be done to ensure that drug lords do not benefit from poor government surveillance of the areas in Myanmar and Laos.
“While disabling syndicate leadership is important, the conditions they were effectively using in the region to do business remain unaddressed and the network remains in place,” he said. “A lot of difficult information is about to come out.”