By Jonathan Stempel
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Two Indian chemical companies have been indicted for allegedly importing ingredients for the highly addictive opioid fentanyl into the United States and Mexico, the U.S. Department of Justice said on Monday.
Athos Chemicals and Raxuter Chemicals, both based in Gujarat, were each charged in Brooklyn with distributing the ingredients and conspiring to distribute them.
Raxuter and senior executive Bhavesh Lathiya, 36, were also charged with smuggling, and introducing misbranded drugs into interstate commerce.
Lathiya was arrested on Saturday in New York and ordered detained pending trial, after prosecutors called him a flight risk and a substantial danger to the community.
"The Justice Department is targeting every link in fentanyl trafficking supply chains that span countries and continents and too often end in tragedy in the United States," U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.
A federal public defender representing Lathiya declined to comment. Athos and Raxuter did not immediately respond to similar requests outside business hours.
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid about 50 times more powerful than heroin and 100 times more powerful than morphine.
Opioids accounted for about 82,000 U.S. deaths in 2022, ten times the number in 1999, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Prosecutors said that since February 2024, the defendants supplied "precursor" chemicals they knew would be used to make fentanyl, and hid their efforts by mislabeling packages, falsifying customs forms, and making false declarations at border crossings.
One indictment said that in October 2024 video calls with an undercover agent posing as a fentanyl manufacturer, Lathiya agreed to sell 20 kilograms of the precursor chemical 1-boc-4-piperidone, and suggested mislabeling them as an antacid.
Lathiya did this after the agent told him his Mexico clients were "very happy with the quality of what you sent me," and with the "yield" from the resulting fentanyl, the indictment said.
The other indictment said Athos agreed last February to sell 100 kilograms of the same chemical to a known drug trafficker in Mexico who was making fentanyl in connection with a drug trafficking organization.
Lathiya faces up to 53 years in prison if convicted, the Justice Department said.