JAKARTA (Reuters) – Indonesia’s navy seized a ship carrying nearly two tons of methamphetamine and cocaine worth $425 million off Sumatra this week, and arrested a Thai national and four Myanmar nationals found aboard the vessel, the navy said on Friday.
Officers apprehended the ship after it turned off its lights and increased its speed to try to flee Indonesian waters in the Tanjung Balai Karimun region of Riau Islands province, the navy said.
Officers seized nearly 100 yellow and white sacks holding about 1.2 tons of cocaine and 705 kilograms of methamphetamine worth 7 trillion rupiah ($425.92 million), navy spokesperson, I Made Wira Hady Arsanta Wardhana, said in a statement.
Indonesia has among the world’s strictest anti-narcotics laws and drug trafficking is punishable by death.
The navy said the ship, bearing a Thai flag, was taken to a navy base in Tanjung Balai Karimun. It did not give details of the crew members’ origins apart from their nationalities.
Officials are still investigating where the drugs came from and where the ship was headed, navy official Fauzi, who goes by one name, said in a press conference.
The seizure is among the largest busts in the country.
A record 190 tons of methamphetamine were seized in East and Southeast Asia in 2023 as organised crime groups exploited weak law enforcement to traffic the drugs, mainly via the Gulf of Thailand, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime said in a 2024 report.
The Golden Triangle – an area of northeast Myanmar that meets parts of Thailand and Laos – has a long history of producing drugs, mainly used by Asian crime syndicates which distribute the narcotics as far as Japan and New Zealand.
In 2022, 179 kg (395 lb) of cocaine were found in waters near the port of Merak on Java island, at the time the largest cocaine seizure in the country, the United Nations drug agency said in a 2023 global report on cocaine.
($1 = 16,435.0000 rupiah)
(Reporting by Stanley Widianto and Ananda Teresia, Editing by William Maclean)
