Canadian Tse Chi Lop was detained at Amsterdam Schipol International Airport on Friday, according to the Australian Federal Police (AFP), who took the lead in an extensive international investigation. Before his arrest, Tse was one of the most wanted fugitives in the world.
“The importance of the Tse prison cannot be underestimated. It is big and (has) taken a long time, ”said Jeremy Douglas, Regional Representative of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in Southeast Asia and the Pacific.
The organization is accused of running a synthetic drug manufacturing empire in large areas of the under-policed jungles of Myanmar, a region marked by civil war and still under the control of several competing warlords and militias – conditions that facilitate industrial hiding. – law enforcement scale drug manufacturing operations.
From there, Sam Gor reportedly managed to acquire large quantities of chemical precursors, the ingredients for making synthetic drugs and then move them around the region to nearby markets in Bangkok, but also to more distant ones in Australia and Japan, for example. enforcement law said.
Sam Gor reportedly had operatives working around the world, with players in South Korea, England, Canada and the United States, according to a union briefing shared with CNN by an employee with direct knowledge of the investigation.
The documents describe Sam Gor as a “triad-like network” – a reference to Chinese ethnic 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, the briefing showed.
Further police investigations revealed that the organization was, in 2018, earning between $ 8 billion and $ 17.7 billion in illicit revenue 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 for Tse’s arrest in 2019 in connection with an operation targeting Sam Gor.
“The union targeted Australia for several years, importing and distributing large quantities of illicit narcotics, laundering profits abroad and living off the wealth obtained from the crime,” AFP said in a statement.
Dutch police spokesman Thomas Aling said Tse should be extradited after appearing before a judge. The Dutch authorities were unable to provide details of the legal proceedings and it was not clear whether Tse had a lawyer.
This is not Tse’s first confrontation with the police. Tse pleaded guilty to criminal narcotics charges in the United States in 2000 and was sentenced to nine years in prison. Details on 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.
Although Douglas, from UNODC, praised Tse’s arrest, he said more needs to be done to ensure that drug lords do not take advantage of weak government oversight in the areas of Myanmar and Laos.
“While taking down union leadership issues, the conditions that they effectively used in the region to do business remain unsolved and the network remains in place,” he said. “A lot of difficult information is about to come out.”