Police forces in Tanta on Tuesday seized a factory for manufacturing narcotics and arrested two people in charge of the factory, including the son of the factory’s owner and an unemployed person.
Police retrieved 100 tablets of the Tramadol drug, banknotes, and a cell phone with the unemployed person.
They are still in pursuit of the factory’s owner.
The interior ministry’s General Administration of Narcotics Control stated that police had been monitoring the three suspects involved for trafficking in narcotic drugs, and preparing a warehouse attached to a house in Tanta for the purposes of producing drugs within Gharbiya and neighboring governorates.
The defendants confessed during investigations that they prepared the materials and tools used for manufacturing and promoting the drugs.
In January Egypt’s Cabinet approved a draft law amending some provisions of Law No. 182 of 1960 on regulating the use of drugs and combating trafficking.
The draft amendment comes within the framework of a decisive response to the problem of the spread of narcotics in all forms, especially the new drugs that are not on the international watch lists or the tables attached to the national narcotics law.
Narcotics have recently become a dangerous phenomenon casting a shadow over the Egyptian society in general and youth in particular.
The draft amendment states that “everyone who brought or exported synthetic substances with an anesthetic effect, or harmful to mind, body, or psychological and neurological conditions shall be punished by death, and everyone who possessed with the purpose of trafficking the substances mentioned shall be sentenced to life imprisonment and a fine not less than LE 100,000 and not more than LE 500,000.”
The amendment also states that “everyone who managed or prepared a place for others to use synthetic substances or made it easy to use shall be punished by imprisonment and a fine of not less than LE 200,000 and not more than LE 300,000. And shall be punished by imprisonment for a period of not less than one year and a fine of not less than LE 1,000 and not exceeding LE 10,000 for whoever was arrested in a place prepared for the use of drugs or synthetic substances while using them with his knowledge.”
Edited translation from Al-Masry Al-Youm
