Kim Hyung-ryul controlled production and distribution from Vietnam. He used Telegram to sell. In the first six months of 2022, the drug shipments intercepted by the Seoul police increased by 11.2%, the number of users among the youngest grows.
Seoul () – For three years from Ho Chi Minh City, more than 3,000 kilometers from the Korean coast, Kim Hyung-ryul was one of the most important South Korean drug lords in Southeast Asia. But today Kim is behind bars in Seoul, awaiting trial. “After three years of cooperation with the Vietnamese Ministry of Public Security, Kim was arrested on July 17 and sent back to Korea,” the Korea National Police Agency announced.
Kim was one of the main producers of methamphetamine from the region, as well as synthetic cannabinoids, so much so that other drug traffickers in Southeast Asia depended on their supplies from Vietnam. According to police, his group has raised more than $5.4 million since 2018. “This is just a rough estimate,” police said. “The exact extent of distribution will be made public as we further investigate, but we assume it will be much broader.”
Interpol had singled out Kim in June 2019 and he had been wanted throughout Korea for more than a year. When he was located, a South Korean police team traveled to Vietnam to organize his capture. Along with him, 20 other South Koreans were arrested as accomplices in the drug trade.
The group handled sales through Telegram and controlled a large part of the market in South Korea. The other two drug traffickers with whom Kim shared Korean markets, one based in the Philippines and the other in Cambodia, were recently arrested. With Kim’s arrest, the South Korean police are now turning their attention to the network of distributors and buyers that the organization had established in the country.
However, the arrest of the three largest drug producers and distributors in South Korea is contrasted by the increased drug trafficking which has been registered in the first six months of 2022. According to information released by the police, intercepted drug shipments have increased by 11.2% compared to the same months of last year. In particular, confiscated methamphetamines practically doubled and the growth is attributed above all to imports from Southeast Asia.
The spread of narcotic drugs in South Korea is a phenomenon that increasingly affects younger generations. Last year, 71% of convictions for drug-related crimes were in the under 40 category, figure that has been growing steadily in recent years. At this time, the incidence of this demographic category on the total number of prisoners for drug crimes is 58.9%, according to the commissioner of the Seoul Metropolitan Police. For many of them this is the first conviction.
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