American held with 5 bottles of suspected cannabis oil at Kathmandu airport
Police at Kathmandu's Tribhuvan International Airport arrested 46-year-old American citizen Ognian Petrov with five bottles of suspected cannabis oil. He was bound for Delhi on Air India flight AI 218 and was handed to the Narcotics Control Bureau for investigation.
🇳🇵 Tribhuvan International Airport, Kathmandu · Nepal
Police at Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu arrested 46-year-old
American citizen Ognian Petrov.[1]Airport Security Office spokesperson Raj
Kumar Silwal identified Petrov as the person arrested.[1]
Officers grew suspicious of Petrov’s luggage during screening at the
luggage-checking area and opened it for inspection.[1]Inside they found five
bottles of liquid resembling cannabis or hash oil, each holding 1.25 litres.[2]Petrov was scheduled to fly from Kathmandu to Delhi on Air India flight AI
218 when the bottles were detected.[2]Police identified him by US passport
number A83488487.[2]
Airport police handed Petrov to the Narcotics Control Bureau police team
deployed at the airport.[1]The bureau took him for further investigation and
legal action, which was still under way.[2]
Case data
Every number and detail the sources state, with the sources that state it.
Nepal News states 10.25 litres per bottle in its opening paragraph but quotes police as saying 1.25 litres per bottle, which Ratopati also reports; this report uses 1.25 litres.
No weight in kilograms was published for the five bottles of suspected oil, and litres cannot be converted to kilograms, so no kg_seized figure is recorded.
The articles give no separate incident date; 18 April 2026, the publication date of both accounts, is used as the incident date.
No charges, custody ruling or court outcome were reported; the suspect was described only as handed to the Narcotics Control Bureau for investigation and legal action.
Police arrested nine people for possessing illegal drugs in separate operations across seven districts of Nepal, the Central Police News Room said. Only one case involved cannabis: about 80 kg of ganja found with a 55-year-old man at Balan Khola in Siraha, while the rest turned up brown heroin, brown sugar or prescription medicines.
The Kathmandu Valley Police Office in Ranipokhari reported 444 drug-related cases and 378 arrests in the first three months of the fiscal year, mid-July to mid-October, part of a wider law-and-order campaign in the Valley. Its account named cannabis among the drugs seized but gave no weight for it, grouping it with heroin, pollen and nearly 296,000 ampoules and tablets.
Nepal's Narcotics Control Bureau arrested two Indian nationals at Kathmandu's Tribhuvan International Airport with six kilograms of ganja flown in from Thailand. The pair, a woman from Ghaziabad and a youth from Madhubani, were caught during airport screening with two passports and four phones seized; questioning and investigation continue.
Police arrested five people while about 210 kg of marijuana in eight sacks was being loaded into two Scorpio vehicles in Chyandanda, Dharan. Officers fired two rounds in the air as the group tried to flee before taking them into custody.
