KABUL: Two men have been convicted of charges related to what authorities call a large-scale conspiracy to smuggle heroin from Afghanistan into the United States.
One of the defendants, Shamsuddin Dost, reportedly bragged to an undercover federal agent during a meeting in San Jose that he had friends in the Taliban and Afghanistan’s government, and said he was willing to kill people who interfered with his business.
“National security people had detained their guys as part of the Taliban…. I secured their release,” Dost said, according to a DEA transcript. He later told the agent, “Don’t worry, those are people that are tied to me….They are Taliban and I know their relatives, uncles and I know their business. If they deviate, I know how to deal with them.”
On March 28, Dost’s co-defendant, Jawed Ahmadi, was sentenced to 70 months in federal prison after peading guilty to conspiracy to distribute heroin. He was arrested in 2016 — on the same day he flew from Kabul to San Francisco and is facing deportation after completing his sentence.
Meanwhile, Dost is facing a minimum of 10 years in federal prison, as well as deportation. He took his case before a jury and was convicted on Jan. 28 of three felony charges related to trafficking heroin, including conspiracy. In 2016, a confidential drug informant told DEA agents working in Kabul that Dost had an uncle who owned Afghan heroin manufacturing facilities, and that they smuggled the drug into the United States inside shipments of rugs.
During the investigation, authorities seized around 13 pounds of pure heroin in undercover buys, but say that amount would have been diluted to about 150 pounds before it was sold on the streets at a value federal agents estimate fell between $3.5 and $8.33 million.
The confidential informant also told authorities that Dost had a connection with a man who’d spent the past 26 years importing heroin from the Nimroz Province, a section of southwestern Afghanistan that shares a border with Iran and Pakistan, and is known as a hub for drugs and weapons smuggling.
