The internal security forces announced that they had seized around a hundred thousand pills of captagon, a synthetic drug, in the town of Zahlé. 2 Lebanese nationals and a Syrian national were also arrested on June 22, say the ISF. The drugs, bound for Saudi Arabia, were concealed inside sterilization tools of medical devices.
As a reminder, on June 18, Lebanese authorities intercepted 14 million captagon pills .
May 4, Saudi Arabia had banned all food imports from Lebanon due to the use by regional traffickers of false import certificates and the transit through Lebanese territory of a drug generally manufactured in Syria.
The production of captagon, a kind of amphetamine, has indeed spread to Lebanon, Iraq and especially Syria, thanks to the Syrian civil war. It thus allowed the belligerents and in particular Daesh, had indicated the American authorities who had succeeded in seizing in 2016 nearly 300,000 pills worth 1.4 million dollars, on the one hand to keep their men in a daze during the fighting but also to have access to sources of financing via its export to the Gulf States and the Arabian Peninsula.
Thus, a Saudi emir, then 29 years old, Prince Abdel Mohsen was arrested on October 26, 2015 at Beirut international airport. he was then trying to leave Lebanon via a private plane with 1900 kilograms of Captagon , a drug produced in very large quantities in Syria, for an estimated value of 250 million dollars at the time. This individual was sentenced by the Mount Lebanon Court of Appeal on March 27, 2019, then released with a travel ban on April 26, 2020, at the end of his sentence. On July 21, 2020, the same day therefore, the Beirut Attorney General of Appeal lifted the aforementioned emir’s travel ban. The Saudi national has since left Lebanon on July 24, 2020.
