VIJAYAWADA: Vijayawada police, who joined the probe to find the source of a courier consignment of Ephedrine powder worth `90 lakh that was confiscated at Bengaluru’s Kempegowda International Airport on Thursday, suspected the role of a man from Chennai in the whole episode.
Vijayawada city police commissioner Kanthi Rana Tata had formed three special teams to probe the case.
On Monday, a police team visited Garlapadu village of Sattenapalli mandal in Palnadu district on Monday in search of Kondaveeti Gopi Sai, on whose name the courier was booked, and found that a duplicate Aadhaar card of Gopi Sai was used while booking the courier to Australia at DST Couriers on January 31.
“The person on the Aadhaar card we obtained from the DST Couriers and the person we traced at Garlapadu village are not the same. We suspect that Gopi Sai’s Aadhaar card is being misused by some unknown persons in Chennai. Gopi Sai completed his engineering at a private college in Chennai recently. Some persons might have acquired his Aadhaar card. They are using it for criminal activities,” said a senior official, on condition of anonymity.
According to sources, a police team was sent to Chennai to trace the person. The information was forwarded to the Bengaluru airport customs officials. “We suspect that the culprit (the person who booked the courier in Gopi Sai’s name) usually go all the way to the place of persons, whose address proofs are with him, to dispatch banned drugs to other countries,” another official told TNIE. On January 31, a person claiming himself as Kondaveeti Gopi Sai approached DST Couriers in Vijayawada to send a parcel to his relatives in Australia. While booking the parcel, the courier agent, Teja, objected to the inappropriate Aadhaar card. However, he booked the parcel using Teja’s Aadhaar card, after being requested.
The Vijayawada police are also collecting details of all courier offices and third-party courier agents in the city. They are checking parcels, especially pickles and ready-made clothes, sent to Australia and other countries for the last six months to find if there are similar incidents. “The culprits approach local and third party agents instead of main offices as there would be less vigil. We have instructed all courier agents to follow strict rules and asked them to alert police if they found anything suspicious,” a police officer said.
Though the courier was actually meant to deliver to a person in Australia, it ended up in Canada due to a technical issue at the dispatch section. The parcel returned to India and reached Bengaluru airport on April 27. Based on a specific intelligence input, the Customs officials seized the parcel with Ephedrine powder worth `90 lakh and arrested courier agent Guttula Teja on Friday and produced him before the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) court on Saturday. “Another team is collecting details from Hyderabad and Bengaluru costoms ofiices,” said Central zone ACP S Khadar Basha.