US offered $ 5 million reward for information on Chinese fentalum trafficker Zhang Jian

The US State Department is offering a $ 5 million reward for information on Chinese Zhang Jian, a Chinese fentalum trafficker and “key leader” of the Zhang Drug Trafficking Organization.

State Department spokesperson, Ned Price, said in a statement that the reward is offered for data leading to his arrest or whereabouts.

As he recalled, Between 2013 and 2016, with Zhang acting as “leader and main organizer,” the criminal organization “imported and distributed controlled substances and their analogues in the United States, resulting in the overdose deaths of four Americans.” in North Dakota, Oregon, North Carolina and New Jersey and serious bodily injuries to five other Americans ”.

Zhang was indicted in North Dakota in January 2018 along with several US, Canadian and Chinese nationals. This investigation has led to charges which include drug trafficking, illicit drug trafficking which resulted in the death and serious bodily injury of Americans, violations of the law on continuing criminal enterprise and money laundering. international, Price explained.

In this way, Washington is offering this award as part of the Transnational Organized Crime Rewards Program (TOCRP) of the Department of State, managed by the Office of International Narcotics Affairs and Law Enforcement.

The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has already sanctioned Zhang in 2018 along with four other Chinese citizens linked to his organization.

According to the interim report released by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 2020 broke records for the number of overdose deaths in the country. Fentanyl, along with other opioids, are the protagonists of this epidemic which parallels COVID-19.

In December 2019, the number of overdose deaths for that year closed at 71,130, while they forecast a total number of 72,151. In 2020, deaths saw a drastic increase of almost 30%, reaching up to 92,183 cases reported and 93,331 according to the predictions of the CDC itself.

This worrying increase in the number of deaths from drug poisoning has been reported since May 2020. For CDC Director Robert Redfield, the pandemic of COVID-19 has been a determining factor in the increase in deaths among drug addicts in the United States: “The disruption of daily life by the COVID-19 pandemic has hit people suffering from a substance use disorder hard,” they said in a few words in the middle of last year to explain this development worrying death figures.

To put these data into perspective, this organization points out that in 2018, some 8,300 people died of overdoses in the European Union, despite a much larger population.

Thus, proportionally to the population, opioids cause 10 times more deaths in the United States than in the EU.

(With information from Europa Press)

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