HYDERABAD: With the law enforcement authorities intensifying efforts to curb ganja smuggling, people associated with the illegal trade are now adopting new techniques to hoodwink the cops. Officials say that women, accompanied by infants, are being roped in to transport ganja.
The new technique was exposed when the Telangana Government Railway Police (GRP) busted an interstate ganja smuggling racket at Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh and arrested 14 persons, including seven women. Three of the arrested women were carrying infants with them. On probe, they revealed to the police that their handlers had advised them to carry their children with them as it would be easy to evade police checks.
A police official said, “This seems to be a new modus operandi. In this case, the children were found to be the children belonging to the arrested women. But in other cases, experienced Ganja smugglers have taken other children to pass them off as their own to dodge the police,” an official said.
As the three children found with their arrested mothers are still breastfeeding, they were sent to judicial custody with their mothers. In the past, smugglers had used napthalene balls and room fresheners to mask the ganja smell from spreading.