Sharjah police and the coastguard arrested fourteen men and seized 2.5 tonnes of hashish from a boat off the Khor Fakkan coast in an operation codenamed Eastern Wind.[1][2] The twelve Iranians and two Pakistanis had stuffed the hashish into bags used to pack cooking flour and were waiting for a chance to slip past UAE territorial waters.[1][2]

Police said a tip-off revealed the gang was hiding the drugs on the boat and looking for a buyer, so one officer posed as a buyer and contacted the gang’s head several times before the squad cordoned off the area and stopped the fourteen as they tried to flee.[1] Sharjah’s police chief, Major-General Humaid Al Hadidi, called it the biggest hashish haul in 20 years, since three tonnes seized on the same Khor Fakkan coast in 1991.[2]

Death sentences and overturn

In November 2011 a Khor Fakkan criminal court sentenced ten of the men to death for trying to smuggle the haul in by sea; another defendant received ten years in jail with deportation, and three minors in the operation were ordered deported.[3] Detectives posing as customers had agreed to buy the consignment, allowing a large police force backed by helicopters to capture the gang in territorial waters, and all had confessed to trying to smuggle narcotics.[3]

In September 2013 the Federal Supreme Court annulled all ten death verdicts because the defendants had been caught smuggling drugs for another dealer rather than for themselves.[4] Ten of the fourteen defendants had received death sentences for smuggling 2.6 tonnes of hashish while one more had received ten years; the court reduced the eleventh defendant’s jail sentence and sent the remaining three, teenagers, to a social care centre pending deportation.[4]