More than 300,000 tablets of methamphetamine (ya bah), 44 kilogrammes of crystal meth (ya ice), and 22 firearms, many of them war weapons, were seized from two suspects in a raid by 191 special operation police officers last week.
Investigators were able to establish that two suspects arrested last week worked for a major drug trafficking network run from inside the high security Khao Bin Prison in Ratchaburi province.
Pol Col Samran Nualma, chief of the special operation police, said the arrests last Wednesday (July 29) arose from sleuthing by a team of undercover agents, who had been on the trail of the two traffickers for about a month.
The suspects were nabbed while attempting to deliver drugs in an isolated soi between Bangkok's Taling Chan district and Nakhon Pathom's Buddha Monthon district. They were identified as Wirach Nuchjaroen, 29, and his girlfriend, Sukanya Sae Tang, 24.
The ya bah and ya ice, with a total street value of B120 million, were seized along with a white Honda Jazz, 22 guns and 1,800 rounds of ammunition.
A probe later linked the two to the Khao Bin Prison drug network. Khao Bin is a maximum-security prison where prisoners with drug convictions serve life sentences.
A source from the Narcotics Suppression Bureau said the prison was notorious as a "headquarters" for big-time drug traffickers who direct their drug empire from behind bars with smuggled mobile phones.
"Those drug inmates could continue ordering, by phone, drugs from the Thai-Myanmar border areas to be delivered to traffickers in the network who distributed the drugs for them," a source said.
Even though they are incarcerated, their illicit wealth continues to grow as all transactions are made by phone calls and money transfers to a network of drug minions, the source said.
Painstaking detective work led police to the two suspects. The 191 police had earlier arrested several small-time drug pushers at night entertainment venues. They confessed to receiving the drugs from other suppliers.
At first police did not know if these "suppliers" were the same individuals in all cases.
But the team tracing the suppliers found one common clue – a white Honda Jazz that was used to deliver drugs to Bangkok from an adjacent province, Col Samran said.
"After we identified the car licence plate, we split the 15 detective-team into three smaller teams and sent them to take turns staking out the suspects and the car parked in the suburb," Col Samran said.
The car was parked for almost a month at a house on Phetkasem Soi 9 in Samphran district of Nakhon Pathom, he said.
But on Wednesday, the two suspects got in the car and headed for Bangkok.
They wandered around Boromratchonnanee Road for a while before turning into an isolated soi, dropped an item out of the car, and parked nearby.
The suspects appeared to be waiting for someone to come and pick up the package. But no one showed up.
Police moved in on the car when it looked like the driver had decided to leave the scene. They found 44,000 ya bah pills, 3kg of ya ice and a handgun in the car.
More drugs and weapons were found at the suspects' house, eight of which were war weapons, Col Samran said.
Investigators said Wirach admitted that he delivered drugs for a man he called "na". He said he was previously paid B60,000 for transporting 60,000 ya bah pills for a drug network in the North to Pathum Thani.
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