The Thai drug dealer who put on a "handsome Korean" face to escape the police

• Drugs The Asian methamphetamine boom in times of pandemic

A package of 290 MDMA pills seized by Bangkok customs officials was the first clue that led Thai police to the "handsome Korean".

This is what his clients called Jimin Seong, a 25-year-old dealer who didn't exist.

At least, in the Thai records, where there

Jimin was actually Saharat Sawangjaeng, an old police acquaintance from the Southeast Asian country.

He had already been arrested three times for

.

From the last arrest, last November, he escaped.

In the time that he was in search and capture, around three months, he underwent surgery to undergo several plastic surgeries on his face.

He wanted to change face.

And he got it.

But the package intercepted at customs triggered police radar, which began digging into the meth lumpen moving through bustling Bangkok.

Tip-offs at street level led officers to the trafficker's hideout in Bang Na, a district southeast of the capital.

That's when the police resorted to a sting operation to catch their prey: one of the officers posed as a desperate man offering himself as a drug mule to distribute the pills around Bangkok.

The "handsome Korean" fell for it.

But for the agents it was also a surprise when, upon arresting him in his apartment, they realized that it was actually the Thai Saharat.

The arrest was made last Thursday.

Police said Saharat had confessed that he bought the MDMA on the

from European suppliers, and that he paid for the synthetic drug with cryptocurrency.

"There was nothing left of his original face, it did not look like the one we had on the police records of the previous arrests. He said that he had changed his name to a Korean one, like his face, because he wanted to travel to South Korea and start a new life, but he didn't speak a word of South Korean," said Theeradet Thammasuthee, the police chief who led the investigation, which links the role of the Bangkok trafficker to an international drug ring.

Saharat's mother, according to local media, was involved in a

from Pakistan in 2011 and has currently moved to France, from where she has established a drug distribution operation.

Although most of the methamphetamine that enters Thailand does not do so from Europe, but through the Golden Triangle, a term coined years ago by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to refer to the border area where Thailand, Laos and Burma.

Deep in their jungles, local militias long ago stopped financing their guerrillas by selling heroin in favor of synthetic drugs that are easy to manufacture and do not depend on the weather.

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