TRIPOLI — A court in Libya has convicted six people of producing the psychotropic substance Captagon for trafficking, the latest move to tackle the illegal spread of the amphetamine-type stimulant.
The court in Qubbah, a small town in eastern Libya, said the first defendant was sentenced to 25 years in prison and fined 22,000 dinars ($3,445), while the remaining defendants were convicted in absentia and sentenced to life imprisonment, each fined 70,000 dinars, according to the Tripoli-based attorney general’s office, which serves the whole country.
The statement did not reveal the quantity of the drug, but included pictures of round, light-colored pharmaceutical tablets and some others in plastic bags alongside metal pill-pressing dies and measurement tools.
The North African nation has become a major regional transit hub for synthetic drugs and other narcotics, the UN said in January. Captagon, or fenethylline, is known as the “poor man’s cocaine” and is popular in the Middle East.
Drug gangs have exploited the tumultuous situation in the country since 2011, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime said in its January report.
Libya plunged into a prolonged period of internal conflict and division after former ruler Muammar Qaddafi was toppled in a NATO-backed uprising that year.
In October, a military brigade operating under the Libyan National Army of military commander Khalifa Haftar seized more than 1.3 million narcotic pills after a firefight with smugglers in the southeastern town of Kufra that wounded three soldiers, according to a statement by the military.
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