Sri Lanka Customs has seized cannabis and hashish worth Rs 157 million that was smuggled in from Thailand hidden inside the components of a table, declared on import as a gift.

The consignment was opened at a Customs warehouse in Peliyagoda, where officers inspecting suspicious items found the drugs concealed within parts fashioned as sections of a table, NewsFirst reported at 7.43 a.m. on Wednesday.

Customs put the value of the hidden cannabis at Rs 24 million and the hashish at Rs 133 million. The two figures sum to the Rs 157 million headline total exactly.

A 29-year-old resident of the Ragama area has been arrested over the shipment. Customs said steps have been taken to hand both the suspect and the contraband to the Police Narcotics Bureau for further investigation, which is the standard route for a Customs narcotics detection once the goods are secured.

What makes this one different

Most narcotics detections this desk has covered in recent weeks were made on people rather than on cargo — couriers stopped at Bandaranaike International Airport, or parcels pulled at the Central Mail Exchange. This was neither. The drugs travelled as freight, inside something built to be opened and reassembled, and were declared as a gift rather than as merchandise.

A gift declaration is a lower-scrutiny category than a commercial import, and furniture components give a concealment cavity that survives handling and X-ray silhouette better than a suitcase lining. The detection came from a warehouse inspection of items flagged as suspicious, not from a scanner alert at a passenger terminal.

Thailand as the origin is also worth noting. Recent airport detections this desk has recorded involved Kush arriving from other routes; the two Rs 51 million BIA hashish cases this month involved Thai nationals as couriers. This is the same drug and the same origin country moving as cargo instead.

Not reported

NewsFirst does not give the weight of either drug, the date the consignment arrived in the country, the consignee’s name or the addressee the gift was declared to, or how long the items sat in the Peliyagoda warehouse before inspection. It does not say what prompted officers to treat the items as suspicious, whether the suspect is the declared recipient or an intermediary, or whether anyone else is being sought.

No filing says whether the suspect has been produced before a court, or under which law Customs is proceeding.

On sourcing

This account rests on one verified newsroom. No other outlet this desk can date had filed on the seizure at the time of writing: the Daily Mirror’s breaking-news listing carried nothing on it, and Colombo Gazette’s index did not reach it.

Ada Derana has also filed on this seizure, at /news/250677 — an ID consistent with the outlet’s current numbering and therefore a genuinely current report. But adaderana.lk has returned a CloudFront 403 to this desk for forty-six consecutive days, so no publication date could be extracted and it cannot be cited under this site’s sourcing rules.

A search summary of that blocked report supplied gram weights for both drugs. Those figures are not reproduced here, because this desk could not confirm them against any page it was able to fetch, and a search engine’s rendering of an unreachable article is not a source.

Sources: NewsFirst — Cannabis and hashish worth Rs. 157 million seized at Peliyagoda.