LUCKNOW: As the horrors of the Barabanki hooch tragedy remains etched in the minds of the people, the Uttar Pradesh Police’s Special Task Force busted another gang of illicit liquor suppliers in Rae Bareli with the arrest of seven people.
On Sunday, the STF team also confiscated 5,250 litre of rectified liquor after the raid in the district, which is just 80 km away from Lucknow. Notably, around two dozen people had lost lives in the hooch tragedy which had struck Barabanki last month.
According to Senior Superintendent of Police, STF, Abhishek Singh, the STF team also seized one lakh Quick Response) code slips, over 24,000 empty bottles for refilling, bottle caps, packaging machine, two urea bags to be mixed with liquor along with 16 cartons of branded country liquor.
The raids were carried out on a tip-off provided by some of the gang members, who were nabbed from Kanpur on Saturday. The SSP said major recoveries were made from the houses of Ram Tirath Yadav and Surya Bhan Singh’s house in Nawabganj locality of Rae Bareli.
As per the police sources, the gang operating in Rae Bareli was involved in the supply of adulterated country liquor, which was made by mixing rectified spirit and urea. The liquor was to be sold as branded country liquor in over a dozen districts.
The gang was active in districts including Lucknow, Barabanki, Sitapur, Kanpur Nagar, Kanpur Dehat, Amethi, Sultanpur, Pratapgarh, Banda, Chitrakoot, Unnao, Fatehpur and Rae Bareli.
Earlier on Saturday, in a major crackdown, the STF had busted another gang in Kanpur’s Babupurwa area with the arrest of four people. The gang smuggled rectified liquor from places in Delhi and Haryana and sold it to manufacturers of spurious liquor in Kanpur.
The STF teams seized around 2,000 litres of rectified spirit from a godown under the Babupurwa police station limits in Kanpur during the Saturday’s raid.