SUNDAY POST HERALD.
APRIL 22nd '73
HK LINK IN MASSIVE
DRUG HAUL
BY K.C. TSANG
THE BIGGEST drug haul in history, seized on Thursday off the coast of South Vietnam, was consigned from a Chiu Chow gang in Thailand to a "Hongkong connection.”
The drugs – 6 tons of opium and 281 lbs of heroin – were being held last night under strong guard in the Vietnamese port of Nha Trang.
The shipment, buried under layers of fish in the hold of a Thai trawler, was grabbed by a South Vietnamese navy gunboat as the vessel headed up the coast of Vietnam towards Hongkong.
Post-Herald
showed:
investigations
yesterday
* The drugs came from a Chiu Chow organisation in Thailand.
•
They were to be shipped to Hongkong by a Thai trawler.
• Another Chiu Chow organisation in Hongkong would collect the drugs at a high- seas rendezvous and smuggle them into the Colony.
In a radio-telephone interview yesterday with a high-ranking official of the Foreign Section of the South Vietnam police force, a Post-Herald reporter was told: “Two Chinese were arrested on the Thai trawler.
"We think they are from Hongkong.”
Speaking in Cantonese, Vietnamese and English, the official, who refused to give his name, said the vessel had been stopped for a routine check.
After searching for arms, the gunboat crew found a large quantity of drugs. The Thai vessel was stopped in Vietnamese territorial waters.
"We have got all the crew behind bars, and the matter is under investigation," the Vietnamese official said.
4
"They were trying to smuggle the drugs into Hongkong."
When asked to comment on the drug seizure yesterday, a Hongkong police spokesman said: *Because it is a public holiday, there is nobody on duty at the Narcotics Bureau. But they say
they can make no comment because it occurred outside Hongkong."
Despite lack of comment by the police.r reliable sources said yesterday drug hunters in the Colony were "delighted" with the news.
"The less drugs that get into the Colony, the less there is available for addicts," one source said.
The 6 tons of heroin was NOT destined to be sold in small packets to the Colony's addicts, it is believed.
Instead, the drugs were to be converted into morphine, then into heroin, and smuggled out of the Colony to the lucrative American market, where it would have sold for an estimated HK$3,750 million.
Mr William Cunningham. U.S. embassy Narcotics Attache, said in Saigon the hold of the 70-foot diesel-powered trawler contained 12.220 lbs of raw opium and 281 lbs of morphine base, worth U.S.$20 million on the New York wholesale market.
"I don't have the figures handy," Mr Cunningham told reporters in his office, “but it may possibly be the biggest seizure ever."
The opium, refined to one-tenth of its weight, plus the 281 lbs of morphine base, would have yielded 1,503 lbs of heroin - worth up to U.S.$ 750 million when sold at retail to addicts in the streets of New York, he said.
It was purchased for a tiny fraction of that amount when loaded on the grey trawler with red superstructure.
"
Had the trawler reached its destination Mr Cunningham said it was "apparently' Hongkong - the cargo would still have fetched far less than in New York.
Hongkong, despite the best efforts of the authorities, not only exports heroin illegally, but boasts an estimated 100,000 opium smokers and heroin addicts.
But the trawler's voyage, unlike that of many others that get through, was interrupted on the South China sea off South Vietnam's central highlands.
Saigon authorities said the trawler was captured within South Vietnam's 12-mile limit. The trawler was escorted to the port of Nha Trang, 188 miles northeast of Saigon, and its crew of nine placed under arrest.
NICK 19/3
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