Students charged over $3m drug bust

Mark Day (left) of Customs and Detective Chris Cahill display some of the items found in Saturday's drug bust. Photo / Sarah Ivey

Five students are accused of using an unoccupied suburban house in Auckland as the centre of a multimillion-dollar drug operation.

The Mt Roskill home was the drop-off address for pallets of granite which hid $3 million of a key ingredient used to make P.

Jinhui Cai, 22, Jiahua Shan, 19, Chen Chen, 19, Ka Ho Kao, 17, and a 21-year-old with name suppression have been jointly charged with importing pseudoephedrine, a Class C drug, and possession of pseudoephedrine for supply.

They are alleged to have imported 67kg of ContacNT which, sold in its raw form, would have a street value of about $3 million.

But it could have been converted into between 13kg and 20kg of pure methamphetamine which police estimated would have a social cost of between $5.5 and $8.2 million.

Police put a watch on 15 slabs of granite after Customs raised the alarm when they arrived in two containers at the Ports of Auckland on Friday.

On Saturday, the stone was tracked to a Mt Roskill address, which one of the five men is believed to have rented for the purposes of drug pick-ups. The men were waiting for it to be unloaded by a delivery company - not thought to be involved in the operation.

"These persons were subsequently arrested after they had opened the concealed goods hidden in the granite and taken possession of them," said Detective Sergeant Chris Cahill of the Auckland Metro Crime Drug Squad.

He said the landlords of the house, who were not tied up in the operation, were working with police.

Police became aware of some members of the group at the beginning of January and had alerted Customs, which had started profiling certain containers arriving to the port.

The pseudoephedrine, which had come from China, was hidden in emptied, plastic Chinese tea packets, inside cavities cut into three of the 15 pallets of granite.

"Chinese authorities will assist with investigations there but it's not easy given the amount of freight that's exported from China to New Zealand on a weekly basis," Mr Cahill said.

"The police and Customs liaison officers in Beijing and Thailand have been made aware and they will follow it up with their counterparts."

Reporters were yesterday invited to the cargo inspection facility at Auckland Airport to see the pallets.

Mr Cahill said police had been aware for a couple of years that Asian gangs had been targeting students to work as "catchers" of drug shipments but he could not comment on whether the latest case involved a gang.

"They're targeted when they're students here. They're targeted around gaming parlours, internet cafes, normally they'll see these other groups with flash vehicles, lots of cash and they'll be lured to the glamour of that."

Some students weren't fully aware of the criminality of the offending as ContacNT was a flu remedy that was legal in China, Mr Cahill said.

"They take the majority of the risk and the major players in the groups get away without facing terms of imprisonment."

Police believed two of the people arrested at the weekend had been involved in the actual importing rather than just receiving the goods.

The method of hiding drugs inside granite was not new but the latest seizure was one of the biggest in recent years, Mr Cahill said.

"This is a very significant seizure and is part of an ongoing attack on high-level methamphetamine drug dealing and a crucial part of the police response to the Government's methamphetamine action plan."

The five students, all in New Zealand and studying English, appeared in the Auckland District Court on Monday. One person was remanded in custody and four released on bail, to appear again on March 29.

An air pistol and an air rifle were seized from one of the men's houses. Mr Cahill said although a firearms licence was not required to hold the weapons, the men did not have a reason for having them. The rifle could deliver a fatal shot, Mr Cahill said.

All the students were born in China. Three are in New Zealand on student visas and two are permanent residents.