Karachi: The world's most dangerous megacity is the next frontier in the global meth trade

[mota bhai 2,675]

BY TAIMUR KHAN | SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2013

KARACHI, Pakistan — The holy month of Muharram is a dangerous time in Pakistan ... Over the past four years, with astonishing punctuality, Shiite processions and mosques have been brutally attacked by Sunni supremacist militants bent on starting a sectarian war.

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Understandably, Karachi's streets were tense on the ninth night of Muharram last year, as final preparations were being made for the Ashura festivities ... 10,000 police officers had been dispatched to the main parade route.

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As night fell on Saturday, Nov. 24, the deputy superintendent of police, Zameer Abbasi, was out making the rounds. He had decided to take one last patrol when he received a phone call around 9:20 p.m. about a small explosion at a nearby apartment building ... When he arrived at the scene, smoke was pouring from a third-floor apartment window.

Abbasi didn't wait for the bomb squad to arrive. He quickly cordoned off the street and raced inside, fearing that there might be more explosives or a suicide bomber. When he got to the apartment, however, the scene was unlike anything he had seen before. A red chemical had been sprayed across the white walls. There was what seemed to be a laboratory: conical flasks connected by rubber tubing, sacks and boxes labeled with the names of chemicals, a small centrifuge. A silvery blue powder was spilled across the bathroom floor, and blood-red footprints crisscrossed the living room. "I thought this might not be the kind of blast I thought it was," Abbasi said. "It looked like some kind of chemical reaction had happened." He didn't know it at the time, but he had just made the first bust of a Pakistani meth lab.

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From 2000 to 2010, Karachi's population grew more than 80 percent ... millions of Pakistanis have fled the fighting and terrorism in their country's northwest to settle in Karachi, Pakistan's pulsing commercial heart -- home to banks and corporations, shipping and transport, entertainment and arts. But the flood of migrants in search of jobs and opportunity has also brought Karachi some less savory additions.

Gangs tied to political parties have long operated in the poorer parts of the city, running extortion rings and land-grab schemes. More recently, Pakistani Taliban militants have also gained a foothold in the city, carving out territory in neighborhoods like Manghopir, where they run criminal and smuggling rackets, rob banks, and administer a cruel and terrifying justice. From restive Baluchistan province, in Pakistan's west, a war economy driven by more than a decade of conflict in Afghanistan has opened Karachi and its ports to narcotics and weapons smuggling. Pitched firefights that go on for days between gangs, or between gangs and the police, are not uncommon.

As a result, Karachi is far and away the world's most dangerous megacity, with a homicide rate of 12.3 per 100,000 residents, some 25 percent higher than any other major city. Consider this telling statistic from a megacity next door: In 2011, 202 murders occurred in Mumbai, India. Karachi had 1,723 -- and more than 2,000 in 2012. Now added to this combustible mix are drug gangs often with links to Iran -- like the one Abbasi and his men busted. And they've brought with them a new commodity that is increasingly making its way from Karachi's ports to the wider world: methamphetamine.

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Iran has emerged as the biggest producer of methamphetamine in the region, but Pakistan still appears to be the natural transit route to eastern markets like Malaysia and Australia, as well as a major supplier of the precursor chemicals that are the drug's main ingredients. There are signs, however, that sophisticated labs are being set up in Pakistan itself, perhaps by Iranian syndicates. And links to Pakistani meth are showing up in places from Mexico to Melbourne.

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The production of methamphetamine is a complex and combustible process, requiring a laboratory and various chemical ingredients, or precursors -- the most notable of which is ephedrine or its close cousin, pseudoephedrine.

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In September 2012, former Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani's son, Ali Musa, was arrested for allegedly pressuring officials, with help from the country's health minister, to increase ephedrine quotas for two pharmaceutical companies. One of these firms, Berlex Lab International, which was granted a license to produce some 14,300 pounds of ephedrine, claims it sold its tablets to a company called Can Pharmaceutical. But according to an Associated Press report: "nvestigators discovered the address for the company was a residential house in Multan, and nobody answered the door. The owner of the company didn't answer his phone." No wonder that prosecutors speculated that the ephedrine was destined for meth labs in Iran.

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Worryingly, the trend appears on the rise ... in 2008, Iranian authorities dismantled two meth labs; in 2010, that number had spiked to 166. That year, Pakistani officials reported four seizures of smuggled ephedrine, totaling 585 pounds, near the border with Iran, as well as more than 14 tons of diverted cold medicine, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). Matt Nice, of the INCB's secretariat in Vienna, said that the size of some of the recent seizures of ephedrine originating in Pakistan suggests that a significant portion of legitimate cold medicine gets diverted to the black market.

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"Crystaal," as it's pronounced, is everywhere, from the city's upscale neighborhoods to the poorer sections, like Lyari. The crime-ridden south-central district is Karachi's fiercest, a dense network of slums housing some 1 million people. It's basically a no-go zone for law enforcement. Police generally need to ask permission to patrol and must negotiate entrance with the district's crime boss: Uzair Jan Baloch, the head of the now-banned People's Aman Committee, a gang cum political party cum philanthropic organization. When police attempted an operation in Lyari this past April, Baloch's men held them at bay for days under a hail of bullets until the police retreated.

In late July, an elite police ranger unit raided Baloch's mansion; he had disappeared into the night.

In Manghopir, a violent, impoverished slum in Karachi's north, the users are easy to spot. "I've seen these guys start banging their heads against a wall; they become out of control. It's like they are numb and don't feel pain," said a community activist who asked to remain nameless due to numerous threats from the Taliban and gangs. "Now heroin is ending and crystal is taking over." A gram of crystal goes for anywhere from 500 to 800 Pakistani rupees -- roughly $5 to $8. That's still more expensive than heroin, but users say the high is more intense. Most of the young men whom the activist sees tweaking in the streets are foot soldiers for Baloch's gangsters: "The gangs hire the kids, get them addicted to crystal, and then make them do crimes when they are high so they have no fear. Then they pay them with more crystal."

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One year before Ali Musa Gilani was charged in Islamabad, another young Pakistani man was arrested for his alleged role in selling ephedrine on the global black market. Shiraz Malik, then 34, was taken into custody last year after landing at Prague's airport on a flight from Dubai. He was later extradited to the United States, where he awaits trial in a federal court in California. Malik is accused of running a multimillion-dollar "industrial scale" online narcotics and precursor business, according to the U.S. attorney in California's Eastern District.

Undercover DEA agents found a website for a Karachi-based pharmacy that offered to ship a number of prescription opiates as well as ephedrine, according to a criminal complaint the DEA filed against Malik. After agents emailed the pharmacy, Malik is alleged to have written back offering to send samples of his wares via express mail. Between 2008 and 2011, Malik mailed everything from heroin to ephedrine powder to Ritalin. The agents wired tens of thousands of dollars to bank accounts associated with Malik in the United States and Europe. After accessing his email account, the agents found that Malik had done regular ephedrine business with customers in Mexico.

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Malik has pleaded not guilty. But there is still what appears to be an online business directory listing for the pharmaceutical wholesaler -- Shama Medical Store -- that the DEA alleges was a front for Malik's operation. In the section for company information, the site reads: "we are abal to provide u any kind of medicion and any kind of row matirial all our tha world and we also doing drop shipping all or tha world." There's even a physical address, located in Karachi's Hijrat Colony neighborhood, which was described to me by an urban-rights activist as "a nursery of crime" controlled by a powerful drug gang known as the "Hamid Terha Group" (terha roughly translates as "crooked").

I decided to pay Shama Medical a visit this past spring and see whether I'd be able to get prices for ephedrine or bulk amounts of cold medicine. I brought along a friend who covers crime for a local newspaper, and we made our way to Hijrat Colony slum, which is bordered by railway yards to the east and a mangrove swamp to the west. We took a main thoroughfare near the port into the colony and were quickly squeezed to a standstill by the suddenly winding, narrow streets. We doubled back, stopping to ask for directions.

Finally, we pulled up to Street 56, got out of the car, and walked into an alley.

After a couple of hundred yards we reached a four-story concrete building with faded red paint that read, "Shama Hospital." Next door was Shama Medical Store. Both seemed abandoned except for a group of young toughs loitering in the shade outside. One of them, with a long beard and wearing a white T-shirt and jeans, asked us what we were looking for; the others just gave us hard stares. "Shama Medical Store -- is it open?" my friend asked haltingly. In the silence, I realized that the street, in the middle of a densely packed slum, was unnervingly empty.

"Yeah, it's here. But it's been closed for a long time," the bearded guy said -- just as an older man in a purple button-down shirt, gray suit pants, and pointy black dress shoes that looked to be made of imitation alligator stepped out of the medical store. A cell phone was pressed to his ear.

We should go, I whispered under my breath. So we did -- walking quickly back to the car and driving away, hoping we wouldn't be followed.

Later, through a well-sourced local contact, I inquired about whether the police and ANF had investigated Shama Medical. They said they had never heard of it.

Taimur Khan is a New York-based correspondent for the National newspaper in Abu Dhabi. This article was reported in partnership with the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/09/03/cooking_in_karachi_meth_pakistan?page=full

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

The Hell's Angels and the Northern California Mexicans will soon be stopping by Pakistan to say hello.

[mota bhai 2,675]

If you read the original article at source, you know the Mexicans are already there.

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

If you read the original article at source, you know the Mexicans are already there.

I don't have a subscription.

[mota bhai 2,675]

Neither do I, I've never had trouble reading their articles. Weird.