Malaysian customs officials have warned that high quantities of the amphetamine drug Syabu is being smuggled through Dubai.
The comments came as Dubai police warned that narcotic pills are increasingly becoming the focus for drug dealers and that police have arrested dealers from 77 countries in the emirate this year.
Syabu, or methylamphetamine hydrochloride, is a cheap stimulant drug that is being shipped in large quantities through the UAE to Asia.
Last Friday, Malaysian auth-orities caught a Japanese woman coming off a Dubai flight with dhs2 million worth of the drug hidden in a secret panel in her suitcase.
A Malaysian customs spoke-sman said this week they were satisfied that syabu does not originate in the UAE.
“We see drugs coming from Dubai, but it is only transit.
It is coming from producer countries, not from Dubai,” he said.
He added that there might be an increase in the amount of seizures coming from Dubai, but said detection of drugs among transit passengers can be very difficult.
Abdul Jaleel Mahi, head of the Dubai police anti-narcotics department, said in July that drug seizures were rising and that smugglers were using Dubai as a hub to transport drugs to Europe and East Asia.
The UN’s annual World Drug Report had also warned that smugglers are increasingly using the UAE as a transit point for amphetamines.
Last month, Malaysian customs caught three Iranian men arriving in Kuala Lumpur airport from Dubai with 262 capsules of Syabu hidden in their stomachs.
Kuala Lumpur customs said that the men were linked to an international drug syndicate.
In June, Malaysian customs officials stopped a man coming off a Dubai flight with 23kg of pickled cucumber.
They immediately became suspicious and found that the cucumbers were soaked in syabu, Malaysia’s first recorded case of smuggling the drug in liquid form.
A Dubai Customs spokes-man, Mourad Tilli, said there has been significant success stopping drugs into Dubai.
Tilli added: “The market for amphetamine appears to be in Asia, it is not as popular in Europe. We don’t know exactly why that is.”
Meanwhile, Dubai Police’s anti-narcotics team has announced that it seized around 1.5 million drug pills in 2009 at a total market value of dhs15 million.
sean.odriscoll@7days.ae