#Huge meth, fentanyl lab found behind storefront in Mexico

Authorities in Mexico broke up a large-scale, clandestine meth and fentanyl lab — hidden behind a storefront that advertised industrial cleaning products, federal prosecutors said Sunday.

The building, on the outskirts of Mexico City, was actually a warehouse packed with stacks of drums and 265-gallon tanks holding chemicals — capable of manufacturing up to 11,000 pounds of raw product at a time, authorities said.

“In the Attorney General’s Office, we have no record of any seizure of equipment of this size before,” said Felipe de Jesus Gallo of the federal Attorney General’s office.

Video of raids in the operation, dubbed “Blue,” shows a warehouse of the same color, where soldiers and cops from Mexico City detained an engineer who allegedly built and operated the lab.

Instructions of how to process fentanyl — which is up to 100 times stronger than morphine — were also found, authorities said.

More than 639 pounds of meth with a “high level of purity” was also confiscated from a lab in the northern state of Sonora, where evidence showed that individuals connected to the operation were tied to the Sinaloa drug cartel, authorities said.

Some of the drugs were headed to the US, Gallo said Sunday.

The raids, which also targeted properties in Mexico City and the northern state of Durango, marked the latest large-scale fentanyl bust in Mexico, where seizures of the synthetic opioid are reportedly up 465 percent this year compared to 2019.

Experts told the Associated Press last month that increased security — and less traffic — due to the coronavirus pandemic have likely made drugs more easy to catch at border crossings.

With Post wires