New life-threatening drug ‘DOB’ in town
The drug was bought using cryptocurrencies and imported from Poland
The Department of Narcotics Control (DNC) claimed to have recovered a new drug in Bangladesh after raiding houses in Khulna on Monday.
It also arrested two alleged drug smugglers and a courier service official during the drive.
The seized brolamfetamine, or bromo-DMA, commonly known as DOB is a hallucinating, extremely dangerous drug and life-threatening in cases, said DNC officials in a briefing on Tuesday.
The officials seized 90 blotters of DOB and 10 blotters of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) from the possession of the arrestees.
DNC officials said that the drugs were bought from dark websites using cryptocurrencies.
DOB and LSD were sent to Bangladesh from Poland using the postal service, said DNC Additional Director Fazlur Rahman.
The arrestees are Asif Ahmed Subho, a web designer by profession, and his associate Arnab Kumar Sharma. The DNC officials also arrested Mamunur Rashid, manager at a Sundarban Courier Service branch in Khulna.
Subho smuggled the new drug after buying it from the dark web, said Fazlur Rahman. While in DNC custody, Subho told journalists that it was the first consignment of DOB he smuggled into Bangladesh from Poland.
He said that he used to surf into dark websites using Tor Browser and brought 200 blotters of DOB and paid around $400 using cryptocurrencies.
The DNC officials said that Subho has already sold over 100 blotters of DOB and buyers are mostly students at Khulna University. The DNC also said this was the first consignment of the extremely dangerous drug imported to the country.
Fazlur said that the arrestees are from well-off and educated families and drug consumers are also from good educational backgrounds.
DNC Assistant Director Mehedi Hasan, who led the raid, said that they found the new drug while raiding to recover LSD in Khulna. The DNC officials seized five blotters of LSD from Sundarban Courier Service's Elephant Road branch in the capital. They traced out that the blotters were sent from Khulna.
Raids were conducted in Khulna on the following day and police detained Subho at his house and seized 10 blotters of LSD and later raided the house of Arnab in search of more LSD blotters, but found the new drug DOB.
Additional Director Fazlur Rahman said that the smugglers were selling a blotter of DOB at Tk10,000-Tk12,000.