New details in heroin smuggling case involving Turkish citizens

The case of smuggling a large shipment of heroin is already in court. According to the indictment, in early 2013 Osman Ugurlu came to an agreement with brothers Mustafa and Ismail Nargez, Turkish citizens, to purchase heroin in Iran and smuggle it into Ukraine and later to European countries, Pastinfo news agency said.

For this purpose he founded and registered a forwarding company, Hovo Logistic, in Georgia on April 12, 2013 and bought a DAF truck where he installed a secret compartment.

In December 2012 Ugurlu purchased lumber and on the pretext of transporting it to Iran, he came from Georgia in Armenia via Bagratashen checkpoint on December 27, 2013. On December 28, 2013 he arrived in Iran via Meghri customs station. Having parked the truck to be unloaded, Ugurlu – on the instructions of Nargez brothers - handed the car key to a man who introduced himself as Nasri who concealed the heroin packed into 47 packages weighing 850 kg, 160 kg and 467 kg in the vehicle’s secret compartment.
On January 16, 2014 he crossed the Armenian border, but the x-ray scanner revealed a foreign object in the car.

The indictment said that Avtandil Martiashvili and Osman Uruglu purchased narcotics in particularly large amounts for sale, concealed the shipment in a secret compartment of a car’s trailer and smuggled it through customs.

Turkish citizen Osman Ugurlu, 40 (has a previous conviction) and Georgian citizen Avtandil Martiashvili, 61, have been charged under the Armenian Criminal Code’s Article 215 part 2 (smuggling of narcotic drugs) and Article 266 part 3 point 2 (illicit turnover of narcotic drugs in particularly large amounts for sale).