To India, via Mozambique: NCB says heroin smugglers trekking new route
NEW DELHI: Instead of directly smuggling heroin from Pakistan into India, traffickers have now found a new route to bring the drugs in — via Mozambique in Africa, the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) said after arresting three people over the past week, and recovering around 14.5kg of the drug from them.
According to KPS Malhotra, Delhi zonal director, NCB, while this poses the bureau a new challenge, the choice of a new route also means that security agencies at land and sea borders have been able to effectively foil plans to smuggle in heroin from usual routes. The revelation on the new route came when the NCB received a tip-off that drugs could land in Delhi via Mozambique.
“Last Tuesday, we set a trap at the Indira Gandhi International Airport, and studied the movement of passengers of two flights, which had left from Johannesburg in South Africa. There were two women who were found to be carrying 9.57kg heroin,” said Rajesh Nandan Srivastava, deputy director general, NCB.
Srivastava said that both women were nationals of Mozambique and that they had concealed the contraband in the lining of their trolley bags. One of these women had visited India in December, the officer said.
Srivastava said the two women claimed they were to hand over the heroin to a man in Greater Noida. The anti-narcotics bureau raided a house in Greater Noida’s Sector 106 and arrested a resident of Ivory Coast in west Africa.
“He was in possession of 4.97kg of heroin. The total worth of the drugs recovered from the two women and their receiver is nearly ₹60 crore in the international market,” Srivastava said.
In the house, the team went on to find 20 empty bags whose linings had been cut open.
“The move suggested that this syndicate was using this mode of operation for quite some time. Going by the possibility that nearly five kilogram of heroin could be concealed in each of these bags, it is likely that they have already smuggled around 100 kilogram of heroin into India in the recent past,” he said.
The interrogation of the suspects revealed that earlier they would collect heroin from Afghanistan and bring it to India via Pakistan. “But now they find that route unfeasible due to repeated seizures. So, they are using the Mozambique route,” Malhotra said.
Reacting to the seizures, Rakesh Asthana, director general, NCB, said the bureau is in the process of strengthening itself on “manpower and technological fronts” to counter the drug menace more effectively.