A Buddhist monk is facing some bad karma after being caught with more than 4.6 million methamphetamine pills, officials said.
U Arsara was driving a Toyota Kluger from Shwe Baho village in the town of Maungdaw in Rakhine state, in Myanmar, when he was pulled over Sunday by members of a narcotics task force.
Cops found 400,000 pills in his SUV and then 4.2 million more – along with a grenade and ammunition — at his Shwe Baho monastery, police Chief Kyaw Mya Win told The Irrawaddy, a Burmese news site.
One million kyats – about $769 — in cash also was found in the vehicle, according to a statement from the office of Myanmar’s leader, State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi.
“This is not a normal case, and when we were informed that the monk was arrested, we were all shocked,” Win said.
The disgraced abbot was a former leading monk in the downtown Baho monastery in Maungdaw before moving to Shwe Baho village, where he lived in his own compound, town resident U Khin Maung said.
“It causes us to lose respect from other religions, and [causes] embarrassment,” said Maung.
Myanmar is one of the world’s top narcotics-producing countries, manufacturing massive quantities of meth as well as opium and cannabis.
In September 2016, Maungdaw police confiscated more than 15 million amphetamine tablets found in the compound of a construction company, where they were stashed under piles of bricks and in a sand-covered truck, according to The Irrawaddy.
Last year, authorities confiscated a record 98 million meth tablets, after seizing 50 million the year before, Agence France-Presse reported.
The number of drug prosecutions also spiked by about 50 percent from 2015 to 13,500, which police said reflected the growth in the local drug trade.
Asked about Arsara’s case, the director general of the Religious Affairs Ministry, Soe Min Tun, acknowledged some surprise.
“It is not a very common case, but not impossible to happen. What will happen to the monk is that he will have to give up his monkhood right away and face trial as an ordinary person,” he said.
With Post Wires
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