The alleged ringleader of Asia’s biggest crime syndicate and one of the world’s most wanted men has been arrested in the Netherlands, with Australian authorities pushing for his extradition to face trial. Tse Chi Lop, a Chinese-born Canadian national, was detained on Friday at the request of Australian police, who led an investigation that found his organisation dominates the US$70 billion-a-year Asia-Pacific drug trade, Dutch police spokesman Thomas Aling said. Tse, an ex-convict who formerly lived in Toronto, has moved between Macau, Hong Kong and Taiwan in recent years, according to counter-narcotics officers from four countries and documents previously reviewed by Reuters. In a statement on Sunday, Australian authorities said a man “of significant interest” to law enforcement agencies had been detained. A police spokeswoman confirmed his name as Tse Chi Lop. Revealed: the China-born drug kingpin in the ‘same league as El Chapo’ Tse has been compared to Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. He has been named by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) as the suspected leader of the Asian mega-cartel known as “Sam Gor”, a major producer and supplier of methamphetamines globally. Sam Gor – or Brother Number Three in Cantonese – is said to be one of Tse’s nicknames. The syndicate is believed to launder its billions in drug money through businesses springing up in Southeast Asia’s Mekong region – including casinos, hotels and real estate. Australia’s federal police said Friday’s arrest followed an operation in 2012 to 2013 that nabbed 27 people linked to a crime syndicate spanning five countries. The group were accused of importing “substantial quantities of heroin and methamphetamine” into Australia, long a lucrative market for drug traffickers. “The syndicate targeted Australia over a number of years, importing and distributing large amounts of illicit narcotics, laundering the profits overseas and living off the wealth obtained from crime,” the Australian police said. As part of the raids across Melbourne in 2012 to 2013 , police seized A$9 million (US$7 million) worth of assets, including cash, designer handbags, casino chips and jewellery. Asia’s biggest drug bust: fentanyl seizure in Myanmar shows gangs shifting to opioids The arrest of Tse almost a decade after that operation’s launch is a major breakthrough for Australian authorities. “Tse Chi Lop is in the league of El Chapo or maybe Pablo Escobar,” Jeremy Douglas, Southeast Asia and Pacific representative for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), said in 2019, referring to Latin America’s most notorious drug lords. Australia’s attorney-general will now begin preparing a formal extradition request for the alleged drug lord to face trial. Most of Asia’s meth comes from “Golden Triangle” border areas between Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and southwest China which are pumping unprecedented quantities of synthetic drugs into global markets. The production of methamphetamine – either in tablet “yaba” form or the highly potent crystallised “ice” version – as well as ketamine and fentanyl, take place primarily in Myanmar’s eastern Shan state, but much of the precursor chemicals needed to cook them flows across the border from China. Thailand in 2018 netted more than 515 million yaba tablets, 17 times the amount for the entire Mekong region a decade ago, said the UNODC. Drug hauls feature near daily in headlines across the region, with traffickers finding more creative ways to ship out their illicit products. Drug crackdowns in Asia surge as illicit trade unaffected by Covid-19 The illicit trade has boomed even as the coronavirus pandemic has disrupted supply chains worldwide. In May last year, police in Myanmar announced they had discovered more than 3,700 litres of liquid fentanyl, one of Asia’s largest drug busts in history. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said the scale of the bust was unprecedented and Myanmar’s anti-drug authorities had “dismantled a significant network” during a two-month operation involving police and military. Last November, Thailand reportedly seized ketamine worth nearly US$1 billion, amounting to a total of 11.5 tons. Additional reporting by dpa, Reuters