Earlier this year, a man and a woman stood trial in a New York courtroom on charges related to the illicit drugs trade. They had been arrested as part of an undercover sting by the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) after more than 200 kilograms of precursor chemicals used to make the synthetic opioid fentanyl were shipped from China to the US. It was enough to make 25 million deadly doses of the drug, authorities said.
The Chinese nationals were also accused of conspiring to import tonne-quantities of fentanyl precursors to the US, where tens of thousands of people die from opioid overdoses every year. After a two-week trial, a Manhattan jury found the pair guilty of conspiracy to import fentanyl precursors and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
Qingzhou “Bruce” Wang, 36, and Yiyi “Chiron” Chen, 32, worked for Hubei Amarvel Biotech (AmarvelBio), a chemical firm based in the Chinese city of Wuhan. They were arrested in 2023 after being lured from China to Fiji as part of a DEA operation and subsequently extradited to the US. The case marked the first time US authorities prosecuted Chinese company executives for trafficking fentanyl precursors.
But court documents showed there may be links to another East Asian country. Bellingcat was contacted by the Japanese newspaper Nikkei, which was investigating AmarvelBio’s connection to Japan, suspecting the country was being used as a command post for the cross-border smuggling operation.
Nikkei was looking into Xia Fengzhi, a Chinese man referred to in the New York legal proceedings as “the boss in Japan”. It had found an individual by that name who was listed as the owner of a Chinese company selling raw chemical materials called Fushikai Trading Co Ltd, which according to Nikkei was active under the brand name “Firsky”. A website for Firsky China included a certificate for Fushikai Trading with the same identification code seen on Fushikai’s corporate records. The company, according to its website, was a wholly owned subsidiary of Firsky Co. Ltd., which was registered in Nagoya, an industrial city in central Japan.
Nikkei pulled the corporate records for Firsky in Japan, which showed Xia headed the company. Records obtained by Nikkei also showed that the Chinese company’s supervisor was listed as Qingzhou Wang, the same name as one of the two AmarvelBio executives convicted in the US.
by 100rad