Ship carrying cocaine and MDMA worth £320m seized by Indonesia

The Indonesian Navy has seized a ship carrying methamphetamine and cocaine worth $425m (£320m) off Sumatra this week, officials said.

One Thai national and four Myanmar nationals found abroad the Thai-flagged vessel were arrested, the authorities said on Friday.

Officers apprehended the ship after it turned off its lights and increased its speed to try to flee Indonesian waters in the Tanjung Balai Karimun region of Riau Islands province. The vessel was taken to a navy base in Tanjung Balai Karimun, the navy said, without sharing further details about the crew members.

Officers seized nearly 100 yellow and white sacks holding about 1.2 tonnes of cocaine and 705kg of methamphetamine or MDMA worth 7trillion rupiah ($320m) in one of the largest drug busts in the country, navy spokesperson, I Made Wira Hady Arsanta Wardhana, said in a statement.

Officials are still investigating where the drugs came from and where the ship was headed, navy official Fauzi, who goes by one name, told reporters.

A record 190 tonnes of methamphetamine were seized in East and Southeast Asia in 2023 as organised crime groups exploited weak law enforcement to traffic the drugs, mainly via the Gulf of Thailand, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime said in a 2024 report.

The Golden Triangle – an area of northeast Myanmar that meets parts of Thailand and Laos – has a long history of producing drugs, mainly used by Asian crime syndicates which distribute the narcotics as far as Japan and New Zealand.

In 2022, 179kg of cocaine were found in waters near the port of Merak on Java island, at the time the largest cocaine seizure in the country, the United Nations drug agency said in a 2023 global report on cocaine.

Last year, Indonesian authorities said at least four people were facing the death penalty for allegedly trafficking drugs into the resort island of Bali, defying the Indonesia’s notoriously strict anti-narcotic laws.

Indonesia has some of the world's toughest drug laws, and has more than 150 people on death row, mostly for drug trafficking offences. About a third of them are foreigners.

Earlier in November 2019, a court in Bali sentenced two Thai nationals to 16-year prison terms for smuggling 1kg of methamphetamine into the country. The same year, a French citizen was sentenced to death on Lombok, an island next to Bali, for smuggling 3kg of MDMA before a higher court commuted his sentence to 19 years in prison.

Additional reporting by agencies.