Pak citizen banished to U.S. on charges of importing heroin

A 31-year old Pakistani national has been extradited to the United States on charges of attempting to send hundreds of kilograms of heroin into the country for distribution in New York City and laundering large amount of narcotics money into America. Muhammad Khalid Khan was taken into custody by Nigerian authorities in Lagos, Nigeria in early February this year and extradited to the US on Monday.

He was presented before the Magistrate Judge Kevin Nathaniel Fox later in the day and an initial conference is scheduled before the District Judge Vernon Broderick, to whom the case is assigned, for May 1, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey Berman said. Berman said that as alleged, Khan was making high-level heroin deals to send multi-hundred kilogram shipments at a time to the US.

"Unbeknownst to Khan, he was dealing with undercover law enforcement. The extradition of Khan from halfway around the world to face justice in New York is emblematic of this Office's commitment to keep potentially deadly heroin out of our neighbourhoods," Berman said. The indictment charges Khan with three counts of attempting to import heroin into the US, international promotional money laundering and international concealment of money laundering.

If convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of life imprisonment and a mandatory minimum sentence of almost 50 years on all counts. According to the allegations, beginning in October 2017, Khan, an Asia-based drug trafficker, began talking to and meeting with individuals who he believed were heroin traffickers interested in purchasing multi-kilogram quantities of heroin to be imported into the United States and Australia.

Those individuals were, in fact, an undercover foreign law enforcement agent, a confidential source working at the US Drug Enforcement Administration's (DEA) direction and an undercover DEA agent posing as a New York-based heroin distributor. Between approximately October 2017 and June 2018, Khan attempted to send hundreds of kilograms of heroin hidden in maritime shipping containers to New York City and Australia and laundered hundreds of thousands of dollars of what he believed to be narcotics proceeds from Australia into the United States.

In January 2018, Khan sold a four-kilogram heroin sample to the undercover agents with the understanding that two kilograms of heroin would be sold in the United States and two kilograms would be sold in Australia. Following the success of this sample shipment, Khan planned to supply larger, multi-hundred kilogram quantities of heroin for importation to and distribution within the two countries, the US Justice Department said.