There Is Narco-Terrorism: Saudi Prince Arrested in Seizure of 2 Tons of ‘Captagon’—The ‘ISIS Drug of Choice’

On Monday, the largest drug bust in the history of seizures at Rafik Hariri airport in Beirut, Lebanon, took place with the capture of 2 tons of the amphetamine, Captagon, in a private plane bound for Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Five Saudis were detained by the Lebanese authorities, including a man whom Agence France-Presse (AFP) identified as Saudi Prince Abdel Mohsen bin Walid bin Abdulaziz. According to a veteran U.S. intelligence officer specializing in the Middle East, the name of the Saudi prince identified by AFP is still being checked out for verification.  However, the source reported, the case file on the Saudi involvement in the trade in Captagon (the brand name for fenethylline) is extensive.

According to AFP, “the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has been cracking down on the smuggling of Captagon for years during the civil war,” knowing that the sales were being used to arm the rebel armies.  “The use of this drug also reportedly jacks-up the ISIS fighters in their much-vaunted suicide missions,” AFP also reported. But the use of Captagon and the ISIS fighters’ fanatical fighting behavior, including the suicide missions, has been reported for several years by investigative reporter Franklin Lamb, who resides in Lebanon, by the British Guardian, Reuters, and Time magazine.

In the last three years, intelligence and security officials in Syria, Lebanon, Russia, and the United Nations have identified Captagon—a synthetic amphetamine that is banned in the United States, but widely manufactured on the black market in Lebanon and Syria—has been the “drug of choice” for the jihadi fighters of ISIS.

In May 2015, Cuba’s Prensa Latina reported that Syrian government officials in the coastal province of Latakia had seized a large cache of smuggled drugs in the coastal waters. Some 800 kilograms of hashish paste (a compressed, potent form of cannabis) and nearly 6 million tablets of Captagon, the drug of choice by the members of the terrorist group Islamic State (IS). “Latakia Governor Ibrahim Khader al-Salem accused the countries that sponsor terrorism against Syria of being responsible for the drug,” reported Prensa Latina.

In April 2015, Yury Fedotov, Director General of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime told a Moscow conference convened by Viktor Ivanov of Federal Drug Control Service that, “The Taliban in Afghanistan, terrorists in West Africa and the Sahel and the Middle East are profiting from the drug trade…. Boko Haram in Nigeria has been involved…. ISIL/Da’esh and Al Nusra Front are also believed to facilitate the smuggling of chemical precursors for the production of Captagon.”

EIR‘s Washington intelligence sources have reported that a large percentage of “third tier” princes (grandsons of King Saud, and more distant royals) in Saudi Arabia are addicted to drugs, and Captagon is one of the most popular.

EIR and Lyndon LaRouche have “written the book” on narco-terrorism, and the Oct. 26th seizure in Beirut is a singularity in opening the Saudi file—including the release of the still-classified “28 pages” of the 2002 Joint Congressional Inquiry into the 9/11 terrorist attack.