The suspects, identified as NP and MJ, might belong to an inter-provincial syndicate, Head of the BNN-South Sumatra Office Brig. Gen. Djoko Prihadi stated here on Friday.
The two were taken into arrest owing to their links to a convicted drug trafficker, named Khadafi, who was apprehended in 2017, and is being jailed in Nusakambangan Prison Island, Central Java Province, he remarked.
NP and MJ confessed that they had delivered the drug packages twice, he remarked, adding that their case is being investigated to uncover their networks in the provinces of Lampung, Jambi, and Riau, he noted.
The suspects told BNN investigators that they were requested by a drug lord, identified as R, to transport the drug package from Pekanbaru City in Riau Province to Palembang, the capital of South Sumatra Province.
Local cops, however, could stop the car that NP and MJ used for delivering the crystal meth package, weighing five kilograms, from Pekanbaru, he stated without elaborating when and where the suspects were arrested.
Domestic and transnational drug dealers consider Indonesia to be a potential market due to its vast population and millions of drug users.
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The value of drug trade in the country is estimated to have reached nearly Rp66 trillion, with the number of drug trafficking cases continuing to surge.
The National Police recently claimed to have crippled the drug rings of Fredy Pratama, a drug lord hunted down for trafficking 10.2 tons of crystal meth and 116,346 ecstasy pills in Indonesia from 2020 to 2023.
Over the past three years, the police had uncovered 408 drug cases related to Pramata's network and arrested 884 suspects, Director of the National Police's Narcotics Investigation Division, Brig. Gen. Mukti Juharsa, stated.
A joint survey conducted by the National Narcotics Agency (BNN) and the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) in 2019 pegged the number of drug users in Indonesia at over 3.4 million.
The survey conducted in 34 provinces indicated that about 180 out of every 10 thousand Indonesians in the age group of 15 to 64 years were addicted to drugs.
The users of crystal methamphetamine, narcotics, marijuana, and other types of addictive drugs can belong to any community and socioeconomic and cultural background.
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Translator: M.Imam P, Rahmad Nasution
Editor: Yuni Arisandy Sinaga
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