Last year, police came down hard on narcotics rings
MORE SECURE Traffickers turn to dark web, bitcoins to hide trail
NEWDELHI:IN 2018, Delhi Police’s crackdown on drugs saw it seize almost four times the heroin that it seized the previous year.
Delhi police officers said that last year, the city police seized 197 kg of heroin, compared to 51 in 2017 and 24 kg in 2016.
According to the annual crime data, 662 persons were arrested for smuggling or consuming banned drugs. This too is a record high in the last decade. It showed that last year, 491 persons (the previous highest) were arrested. In 2016, the number of arrests was 370.
“There has been a concerted action against drug trafficking, which has resulted in the recovery of huge quantity of narcotics substances. Anti-narcotics squads have been set up in all districts across the city for action against drug traffickers,” said deputy commissioner of police Madhur Verma, who is also the police spokesperson.
Police said they are focusing on big cartels that smuggle drugs into the country.
One such cartel was busted in October last year, when police arrested two men. Packed in tea packets, the heroin was transported to the northern plains of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and metropolitan cities from Myanmar and parts of Thailand. In September, three foreigners were caught with heroin at a market in south Delhi. Police investigation revealed the three had smuggled the drug from Afghanistan and had built a large clientele in Delhi and other cities.
Another increase in seizure was that of marijuana — the most commonly used drug in the city.
According to police data, last year police recovered over 4,200 kilogram of marijuana, almost double what the police seized in 2017.
Police said they are on the lookout for gangs using all types of modus operandi to smuggle drugs such as marijauana.
Last week, Delhi police busted a gang and arrested two men, who imported drugs online via dark web and paying through cryptocurrency from the US and other countries, to distribute in the city.
The dark web is popular among drug traffickers because the websites are accessible only through networks such as Tor (the onion routing project) and I2P (invisible internet project).
The complicated system makes impossible to reproduce the node path and decrypt the information layer by layer.
Due to the high level of encryption, websites are not able to track geo-location and IP of their users.