Lebanese police seize 2,500 kg of hashish in Bekaa warehouse raids
Lebanese police seized 2,500 kg of hashish in raids on warehouses in the village of Barga in the Bekaa Valley on 1 February 2002. Canada's Immigration and Refugee Board records the seizure in a research response on organized crime and the drug trade in Lebanon, citing Associated Press reporting of the same day.
🇱🇧 Barga village, Baalbek district, Bekaa Valley · Lebanon
Lebanese police seized2,500 kilograms of hashish in raids on warehouses in the
village of Barga in the Bekaa Valley on 1 February 2002.[1]Canada’s
Immigration and Refugee Board records the operation in a research response on
organized crime and the drug trade in Lebanon, citing Associated Press
reporting of the same day.[1]
The response places the raid in a year when cannabis cultivation in the valley
was rising even as eradication continued, and notes that convicted drug
traffickers in Lebanon faced up to 15 years in jail.[1]
Case data
Every number and detail the sources state, with the sources that state it.
Only one opened page, the IRB research response citing the Associated Press, carries this seizure; a contemporary KUNA report of 2 February 2002 could not be reopened.
The response names no arrests, charges or warehouse owners from the Barga raids.
A separate 6,000 kg warehouse seizure near Baalbek later in February 2002 is a different event left out here.
The village appears as "Barga" in the IRB response and "Barqa" in the KUNA wire; this report uses the IRB spelling.
No photograph of the raids or the seized hashish with a recoverable direct image address was found in the opened sources.
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Customs seized 6.416 kg of hashish at Beirut airport from an Egyptian traveller, hidden in a shipping suitcase and bound for an Arab country. The case was one of the few cannabis-specific seizures reported in 2024.
Lebanon's Internal Security Forces stopped eight soil-carrying trucks bound for Beirut port and found about 25 tonnes of hashish hidden in the bags, the largest drug seizure in the country's history. The haul, announced on 10 April 2020, was bound for an unnamed African country.
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