Many arrests followed quickly. It was not long before two members of the band, realizing that the game wps up, made a full confession. One of them had acted as storekeeper for El Sawi in Cairo. In the courtyard of his house (Screened on all ides from prying eyes) was found, buried in the ground at a depth of about half a metre, a wooden box, which in turn was protected by an outer shel of zine to guard the contents from damp. In this box were 18% kilos of hashish. Further investi gation showed that a previous hiding place had existed in a store-room, the floor of which had been specially made of concrete, one comer, however, having been made into well about a metre and a half deep, the whole covered with a stone slab.
The accuracy of the information so painstakingly gathered by the Bureau concerning the band was startlingly confirmed by the results of various perquisitions and arrests carried out in the provinces at different points far distant from one another. In every ease clients of the yang whose names had been given to the Bureau were found in Possession of drugs.
One of the most important arrests was that of a certain' Khazindar. 'This man, who proved to have been closely associated with Sawi, was by trade. a licensed opium dealer. 'That' is to say, he was permitted under certain conditions to have in hhis possession 134 kilos of opium and to trade in the same with authorized persons. On his arrest the office he had occupied was searched and seven cases. of opium were found, the weight being 109° kilos. The boxes bore the seal of the Pub-Health Department showing that they had been inspected by the department. From his books it. appeared that he had sent his returns In regularly up to 1932, Since that year the department had made frequent applications for the monthly Feturns without success, iesinous Compounds Shortly after Khazindar's _arrest the Bureau received information which caused it to send for the boxes of seized opium. These were examined by the Medico Legal Department, which reported that out of the seven boxes of opium and th only three kilos of a very poor quality. The contents of the remaining boxes, were merely a mixture of various resinous compounds, which appeared to have been washed over with 8 week solution of tincture of opium 0 as to give them the right smell. The remaining 131 kilos, which. he was supposed to have in stock, had obviously been illietly sold.
Another and equally serious aspect of this ease was that it was clearly the intention of Khazindar to perpetrate a swindle on the Govern ment, Had the police accepted this pseudo-opium as the real article would on release have claimed his 134 kilos. As he was entitled, as a dealer, to have this quantity, the police would have been bound by' Inw to hand him back his property and Khazindar would promptly have turned round and said. that this not the opium the authorities had} Seized in the first place but some product which they had themselves substituted. He would then have! claimed the value of the missing oplum—same £4,000. Fortunately the ruse was discovered in time.
The brother of the leader of the Sawi gang was convicted, it Is interesting to note, as the result of discoveries "made in another ease in which a famous Greek traffickers was implicated, This traffickers had a. secret. repository behind Cairo station where, hidden in the walls, were found ledgers giving full details of his nefarious activities, including dealings in hashish and heroin, to the tune of £13,000, with the Sawis. Another interesting character among the men now convicted is the chief of the Egyptian Army Signal Bureau at Abbassia. He was used by the elder Sawi to aid him in transporting his more important consignments about the country. The Signal officer, riding in uniform in an automobile, naturally allayed any suspicions as to any contraband being in the car. He had been working in collusion with the Sawi band since 1927 and he fully deserved his sentence of three years' imprisonment and the fine of £600 that accompanied it, 'There. are ample proofs in the possess ich of the Narcotics Bureau to prove that drugg are now begin: ning to come to Europe' from the factories which have been set up in China to replace those confiscated in European countries as the result of the campaign that has been carried ontfor several years now by the Central Narcotics Bureau under Russell Pasha.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.