KOCHI: Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB), in coordination with the Indian Navy, Coast Guard and coastal police, has upped surveillance in the Arabian Sea along the Kerala coast following inputs that Pakistan-based drug networks are continuously pushing larger consignments of heroin, cocaine and MDMA to India.
A special task force under a Lt Commander of the Navy has been assigned to undertake midsea operations to seize boats and vessels that carry drugs based on inputs from the NCB and other enforcement agencies. Senior officers of the NCB told TNIE that the drug rackets operating in India, Sri Lanka and Maldives have formed nexus with Pakistan drug cartels to undertake largescale smuggling of drugs through the Arabian Sea route.
“We have specific intelligence that Pakistan drug lord Haji Salim is smuggling drugs into India through the Arabian Sea. We have launched a detailed probe to identify those who are colluding with his drug network from the Indian side,” said a senior NCB officer. NCB could bust three consignments of drugs belonging to Haji Salim drug cartel in the past one year while they were being smuggled in to India and Sri Lanka via sea.
“We had seized communication gadgets from the Iranian nationals who were arrested from the Iranian trawler carrying over 200kg of heroin. We expect to make a breakthrough in finding the recipients of the drug consignments using these gadgets,” said the officer.
The National Investigation Agency (NIA), which is also conducting a probe into an earlier seizure of drugs from a Sri Lankan boat, recently raided certain locations in Tamil Nadu to identify the rackets that are part of the Pakistan drug cartel. “It’s either the Sri Lankan Tamils or Indians who are operating from the Indian side in midsea to collect the drug consignments from Iranian boats. Each Iranian boat coming with drug consignment from Pakistan is given specific coordinates for transferring the drugs to another boat,” the officer said.
The NIA probe had revealed that the drug network on the Indian side was controlled by C Gunashekharan alias ‘Guna’ and Pushparajah alias ‘Pookutti Kanna.’ They were allegedly operating the distribution of the drugs sent by Haji Salim.
Midsea war