Brian Whitaker, Middle East editor
Wednesday May 10, 2000
Drug smugglers abducted and killed a small girl, then stuffed her body with drugs in order to take them into a Gulf state, a senior police officer was reported as saying yesterday. Officials at the unnamed airport saw a woman cradling the child in her arms, apparently asleep. As the woman passed through immigration control an officer teased the child, but there was no response. Then he realised she was dead.
Sympathy quickly turned to horror when officials discovered that the girl's body was packed with drugs. They concluded that she had been killed for the specific purpose of smuggling narcotics.
Major Abdul Rahman Naser al-Fardan, head of the drugs squad in Sharjah, one of the seven states in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, was describing how smugglers are resorting to increasingly desperate and cruel measures to conceal their wares.
They have been known to pack drugs inside the Koran or in the frames of Islamic art. In one case a blind man had a white stick full of drugs.
The Gulf has long been recognised as a staging post for drugs on the route from Pakistan and Afghanistan to Europe. It is also believed by some to be a money-laundering centre for the proceeds.
In states where alcohol is prohibited and drugs offend social and religious sensibilities, the problem is officially portrayed as a foreign one. Asians are blamed for 80% of drug dealing and the authorities become coy at suggestions that part of the trade may be aimed at a local market.
The Emirates does, however, have several drug rehabilitation centres.
Although Major Fardan does not admit to a drug abuse problem in the Emirates, his remarks, in a talk to Zayed University students reported by Gulf News yesterday, highlighted concern that the rich - and often bored - Emirates youngsters could be at risk.
He warned that parents should not allow their children to travel alone to countries where drugs are sold openly, or which are known to have "addiction dens".
Drug abuse among wealthy Arabs tends to be hushed up, with offenders sent by their families for medical treatment. Smuggling and dealing, on the other hand, attract severe penalties. Executions are common in Saudi Arabia, and there have been several in Kuwait and the Emirates - though there the penalty depends on the type of drug and the amount involved.
Eman Abdullah, who reports on crime in Dubai, said the most common drug in the region is hashish. In Kuwait, opium is said to be popular.
The drug stuffed inside the child's body at the airport was codeine, a synthetic opium-related painkiller used medicinally in the west but not freely available in the Gulf. A spokeswoman for Release, the drug advice organisation, said: "It's quite a powerful painkiller and people can become dependent on it. In Britain there's a small black market. It might be used by addicts as a substitute for heroin."
Kuwait is the only Gulf state which publicly acknowledges that it has a drug problem. According to local press reports there are more than 29,000 drug addicts, in a population of 1.7m. Almost half of the 2,000 prisoners in the central jail are there for drugs offences.
