Saudi border police seize drug-laden glider

RIYADH—Saudi border police seized a glider packed with drugs from Iraq that flew into the kingdom’s airspace last week, the interior ministry said in a statement on Wednesday.

Northern border police detained the pilot and seized more than 700,000 captagon stimulant pills from the motorized glider, said the statement carried by the official news agency SPA.

Interior ministry spokesman Mansour al-Turki said the craft flew across the Saudi border at dawn last Tuesday. Ten people were arrested over the drug smuggling attempt, the first time a glider had been used for criminal activity in Saudi Arabia.

Captagon is classified by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime as an “amphetamine type stimulant” and usually blends amphetamine, caffeine and other substances.

It is particularly popular in Middle Eastern countries, with regional captagon seizures there and in southwest Asia rising steadily, according to the UNODC.

The Saudi government regularly seizes hundreds of thousands of captagon pills each year.

The use of the glider raised fears among officials that militant groups could carry out attacks using similar tactics.

“The goal of this particular group was confined to smuggling drugs, but the idea itself poses the danger that such methods could be used to threaten the security of the kingdom…which has been the target of terrorist acts,” Turki said in the statement.

He added that the drug smugglers were intercepted thanks to increased border security measures launched two years ago.

In July 2009, Saudi Arabia signed a deal with the European aerospace and defense contractors EADS to build a high-tech security fence on 9,000 kilometers (5,600 miles) of the country’s border.

The so-called MIKSA project was first envisaged in the 1990s in the wake of the first Gulf War to secure Saudi Arabia’s border with Iraq with physical fencing and high-tech monitoring.

But with increased worries over infiltration into the country by anti-government militants and Al-Qaeda operatives, the Saudi interior ministry expanded the scope of the program to fence and electronically monitor all the country’s borders.