"The three suspects arrested by the ISF." (Credit: ISF website.)
Lebanese police announced in a statement published Monday the arrest of a woman and two men suspected of attempting to send abroad, via Beirut's international airport, Captagon hidden in hookah equipment.
According to the statement, the case was uncovered with the customs seizure at the airport of a postal package containing "wooden tables" designed for setting up hookahs, in which 3.2 kg of Captagon tablets were hidden. Police specified that this synthetic drug was intended to be illegally exported to Europe.
The alleged sender of the package was located in Kobbe, a neighborhood in Tripoli, North Lebanon, and arrested in coordination with the city’s regional narcotics control office. Two other accomplices were identified and located following additional investigation in the locality of Bab al-Hadid, also in Tripoli. "A car and a motorcycle belonging to them were seized, and the arrest of other network members is ongoing, in coordination with the competent judicial authorities," the text emphasizes. The three suspects are Lebanese.
Captagon, an amphetamine used in the treatment of narcolepsy and attention deficit disorder, has been counterfeited since the early 2000s.
Nicknamed "Abou Hilalain," Captagon can have addictive and hallucinogenic effects and increase endurance, aggression, and euphoria. Popular in the regional market and especially in Saudi Arabia, it had become Syria's principal export under Bashar al-Assad's regime, and his fall revealed the extent of it while cutting the land routes for its export from Lebanon.
Today, producers exhibit a surplus of inventiveness to produce and export it, and seizures are regularly announced in Lebanon, along with raids in production workshops, mainly in the Bekaa Valley. It was after a seizure in Saudi Arabia in 2021 of millions of pills from Lebanon that the Wahhabi kingdom, and several other Gulf monarchies following suit, decided to ban certain Lebanese imports.