Woman arrested with 200,000 speed pills from Laos

NAKHON PHANOM, April 9 (TNA) -- Police arrested a woman in Nakhon Phanom's provincial seat late Sunday night for allegedly smuggling 200,000 methamphetamine pills into the country. Pol Maj Gen Suwichan Yankittikul, chief of Nakhon Phanom police, told a press conference on Monday that Orasa Wongtasaeng, 42, was arrested after accepting the drug worth 20 million baht from a trafficker on the Thai bank of the Mekong river in Ban Kham Thao village of Kham Thao sub-district. The narcotic was transported on a boat from the Lao side. The woman is a local resident and employee at a noodle shop in the provincial seat. Police stopped her while she was riding her motorcycle and found 20 packs of the speed pills which were ordered for sales during the Songkran festival, Pol Maj Gen Suwichan said. The suspect said that she accepted the narcotic from a Lao relative and was hired for 20,000 baht to keep the pills for resale. Police in Nakhon Phanom seized almost 5 million speed pills and more than three tons of marijuana in the past two months. The amount of seized narcotics peaked in decades as smugglers shifted from the North to the Northeast, Pol Maj Gen Suwichan said. (TNA)