Ganja smuggling racket busted, seven arrested

The Secunderabad Railway Police busted an interstate ganja smuggling gang and arrested seven persons including a woman in different cases.

The police also seized ganja worth `28 lakh from them. The smugglers were smuggling ganja from Odisha to Mumbai in trains.

In the first case, the suspects are Jitender Pradhan, Pappu Sahu, Babhulla Nahak, Pankaj Jain and Jogya Bontu Lima and in the second case, Jayanth Kumar Sahoo and Sabitri Sahoo.

The Railway Police said the suspects hailing from different parts of Odisha were into ganja smuggling since many months and had been supplying Mumbai and some other parts of Maharashtra.

“They purchased ganja from villages at cheap prices and transported it to Mumbai through trains and sold it to dealers there at high prices,” Mr S. Rajendra Prasad, the incharge superintendent of police (Railways) said.

On Sunday night, police found the suspects travelling suspiciously in the train and nabbed them along with their luggage. It was found that they were carrying six trolley suitcases packed with 32 packets of ganja weighing around 150 kg.

The value of the seized consignment drug is around `25 lakh, said Mr Prasad.

In another incident, two other suspects were found travelling in suspicious circumstances. They were arrested and cops found they were carrying two luggage trolleys packed with 14 packets of ganja weighing around 70 kg which they had purchased from villages and were transporting to Mumbai.

The value of the seized ganja is around `13 lakh. The police seized 220 kg ganja worth `28 lakh from the suspects.