NEW SOUTH WALES, Australia — Australian police officials on Monday arrested a man on drug and traffic charges after he crashed his van, which held more than $200 million worth of suspected methamphetamine, into patrol cars parked outside the police station.
The man, identified by The Washington Post as Simon Tu, 26, of Berala, is charged with large commercial drug supply, negligent driving and not giving his particulars to the police, according to the New South Wales Police Force. He was denied bail on Tuesday.
"This would be one of the easiest drug busts the NSW Police has ever made," Police Detective Chief Inspector Glyn Baker said, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.
Baker said in a video posted on Facebook that officers inside the Eastwood police station heard a "loud crash and bang" just after 10:30 a.m. Monday and went outside to find that a couple of parked police cars had been struck, with one sustaining significant damage. Eastwood, like Berala, is a suburb of Sydney.
Surveillance footage outside the station showed a white Toyota HiAce van strike the parked cars and keep moving. Officers are seen in the video running outside a few moments after the collision.
An inspector from the Ryde Police Area Command located the van traveling in Ryde about an hour later and stopped the driver, Baker said.
Officers who searched the van were stunned by what they found.
Inside were 13 moving boxes containing more than 600 pounds of a crystalline substance that presumptive testing at the scene indicated was meth.
According to a news release, the estimated potential street value of the drugs is more than $200 million.
Tu "certainly had a very, very bad day," Baker said in the video.
“Crashing into a police vehicle with that amount of drugs on board is somewhat unheard of, and it is an exceptional set of circumstances,” Baker said.