Egyptian police seized a 15-tonne truckload of marijuana, known as “bango” in Egyptian slang, as it was being smuggled west out of the Sinai Peninsula toward the Nile Valley.[1][2] Officers stopped the truck as it tried to pass through a tunnel under the Suez Canal.[1][2] The driver was held for questioning about the party that had supplied the drugs.[1][2]
A record haul
General Adel Rifaat, the head of security in Suez province, called it the biggest seizure in the country’s history.[1][2] The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime ranked it among the biggest cannabis seizures ever recorded: 45th of 22,330 marijuana seizures on its books, and the 12th largest reported since 2010.[1][2] “It’s definitely very big,” the office’s research officer Thomas Pietschmann said from Vienna, adding that it was bigger than any previous seizure reported by Egypt.[1][2] Marijuana grown in Egypt is mostly consumed domestically, he said.[1][2]
Lax security after 2011
Cannabis farmers had expanded cultivation in Sinai by exploiting lax security since the 2011 uprising that swept Hosni Mubarak from power, Rifaat said.[1][2] He said the quantity of drugs coming out of Sinai rose after the revolution because security operations that used to target bango crops had stopped, and the lack of operations caused big production of the drug.[1][2]
