THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The state police have unmasked the identity of 62 drug dealers, who have been operating from behind the curtains and hitherto remained unknown to the law enforcement agencies, after a 5-month long special operation conducted by the state intelligence wing.
The dealers, all men and hailing from diverse social backgrounds, were identified during an operation launched by the technical wing of the intelligence with the assistance of the intelligence operatives on the ground.
What makes the list so special is that the 62 men, who featured in it, had no criminal antecedents. The local police as well as the local intelligence plainclothes were clueless about the involvement of those men in drug cases.
A highly-placed officer told TNIE that a special drive was launched this January to bring to light those men, who were secretly involved in smuggling drugs into the state without leaving any footprints behind. “None of those 62 men were on the police radar. Overtly, they were into various professions, but covertly they were into drug peddling and that was their main source of income. They were found to be having inter-state connections and played a key role in bringing synthetic drug into the state,” the officer said.
The technical intelligence wing, according to the officer, painstakingly retrieved tidbits of information from various sources, including social media platforms. The contacts of those who were earlier caught by the police in drug cases were also traced to find covert members of drug rackets. The information collated by the technical wing was corroborated using the local intelligence sleuths.
This helped weed out names that were wrongly included by the software. “We had over 62 names. However, many were found to be included wrongly by the software. For example, two women, primarily homemakers, were on the preliminary list after the digital footprints showed they were part of drug rackets. However, the local intelligence reports gave them a clean chit and their names were removed,” said another source.
The list has people who operate under the garb of auto drivers, people who returned from Gulf regions, and manual labourers. The list was forwarded to the district police and six people have been so far arrested under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act. Sources said the men arrested were from Thiruvananthapuram City, Kollam City, Alappuzha City, Ernakulam Rural and Kozhikode City.