HYDERABAD: Two more persons were arrested on Thursday by the state Prohibition and Excise department officials on charges of supplying and possessing LSD. The two arrested include KP Anirudh (30) from AS Rao Nagar and Santosh Deepak (22) from Old Alwal. The duo were selling the drugs in AS Rao Nagar , Alwal, Yapral and other localities and were found in possession of 62 units of LSD, deputy commissioner of excise (Hyderabad) C Vivekananda Reddy said.
He said Anirudh used to procure LSD stamps through ‘dark net’ and pass it on to Deepak to sell it among users. “They don’t know who was selling them drugs or from which country it was being sent. They used Zebpay App to make payments,” Vivekananda Reddy told at a press conference here.
Assistant excise superintendent Anji Reddy said that after Anirudh made payments using Bitcoins through a mobile application, the psychotropic substances used to be directly delivered through courier or postal services to his home address.
He said that they got details of two bank accounts which was used to make transactions and they will go through their records. A ganja addict, Anirudh was debarred from an engineering college in Maharashtra. He pursued a six-months course in a Music Academy in Chennai and managed to get some jobs as musician in the film industry.
Though he was a heavy ganja addict, he did not have any crime history. However, Santosh Deepak was caught twice for chain snatching in Alwal limits. Phones of the two were found locked and officials are trying to break to know their customer base. It was not known whether the two had contacts with the arrested eight accused who were caught by the department in past five-days. The Excise department arrested eight persons and seized 862 blots after busting the narcotics racket in the city in the last five days. Deepak and Anirudh were booked under relevant sections of NDPS (Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances) Act.
No easy task
Though the crackdown on drug peddlers by excise department started on Saturday night, two drug suppliers Anirudh and Santosh Deepak, who were caught on Thursday carried out a deal on Monday. Officials of the department were taken by surprise at the risk that the suppliers were taking. Call it recklessness or desperation, even when sleuths of the department were breathing down the necks of suspects for the past five days, suppliers and peddlers continued to sell psychotropic substances.
This helped the to catch Anirudh and Deepak and seize 62 LSD blots from them. However, it was no easy task. An official, who was part of the operation, said that they had to cross a chain of six people to reach Anirudh and Deepak. “When a peddler was called seeking LSD, he switched off the phone for three hours. But he returned the call to know if he can trust the buyer. We weaved a story saying a friend from other state is in town and he gave in,” said the official.