At least five drug traffickers have been killed in a clash with the Thai Army during a special operation carried out on the border connecting Thailand with Burma, specifically in Chiang Ra province.
During the early hours of Wednesday, January 12, Pha Muang special forces commander Suparerk Sathaphonphol set up a surveillance patrol along the Thai-Burma border to prevent drug smuggling into the country, reports ‘Naewna’.
Later, about 100 military officers spotted a group of seven to eight men from neighboring countries carrying luggage as they walked through a forest along the two countries’ common border.
During the search for the men, they used firearms to fight the soldiers, at which point a five-minute gun battle broke out on both sides.
While no members of the Thai Armed Forces have been injured, there were five dead on the opposite side. Each of them was carrying 100,000 methamphetamine tablets, bringing the total number of tablets seized by the Army to 500,000. The whereabouts of the rest of the people are unknown, according to the newspaper.
A similar incident took place in December and resulted in the death of 15 traffickers, while last Sunday the Thai Army managed to kill another six drug traffickers.
Methamphetamine trafficking in Thailand has skyrocketed since the military coup in neighboring Thailand in February 2021. Since the return of the Burmese military to power, security forces in East and Southeast Asian countries have seized more than 170 tons of methamphetamine, the equivalent of more than 1 billion pills, according to preliminary data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
