October 31, 2007	Wednesday	Shawwal 18, 1428

BANGKOK: Former drug lord Khun Sa, one of the world’s most wanted men on whom the United States had put a two million-dollar bounty, died at the weekend in Myanmar, a Thai narcotics official said today on Tuesday.

“Khun Sa has died of various diseases and old age,” the senior official said. The man who was once Asia’s most notorious drugs trafficker, was thought to be 74-year old and was suffering from diabetes and high blood pressure. A spokesman for the Shan State Army where he had been allowed to live after surrendering to the government in 1996.

While authorities saw him as a narcotics kingpin, Khun Sa painted himself as a liberation fighter for the ethnic minority Shan, leading the Shan United Army, which later became the Mong Tai Army, in Myanmar’s north-eastern Shan state.

At the height of his power, Khun Sa ruled over a drugs kingdom in the drug-producing Golden Triangle region where Myanmar, Thailand and Laos meet, one of the world’s major sources for opium and its derivative, heroin. He was indicted in 18 for drug trafficking by a US court.—AFP