INDIA ATTENDS NARCOTICS CONTROL CONFERENCE

Indian narcotics control authorities are excited with the recent shutting down of AlphaBay, the largest global online dark market, by the Americans. India’s Narcotics Control Bureau chief Rajendra Pal Singh, an Uttar Pradesh cadre IPS officer, recently went to Hanoi to attend a major conference to evaluate the current scene. Of late, the Vietnamese drug criminals are active on the route touching India. Early this year, three Vietnamese nationals, including a 36-year-old woman, were arrested in Delhi and three kilograms of cocaine and 450 grams of methaqualone, valued at over Rs 21 crore in the international market, were seized from their possession. At the Hanoi conference, international drug control authorities’ representatives, including the Americans and the Thai, discussed the current illegal narcotics trade and various smuggling routes, including dark websites. AlphaBay was a major source of Fentanyl and heroin linked to overdose deaths, and was used by hundreds of thousands of people to buy and sell illegal goods and services anonymously over the internet across the world, including India. To nab AlphaBay, the Americans were helped by Thailand, the Netherlands, Lithuania, Canada, Britain, France and the European law enforcement agency Europol. On 5 July, Alexandre Cazes, aka Alpha02 and Admin, 25, a Canadian citizen residing in Thailand, was arrested by the Thai authorities on behalf of the US, for his role as the creator and administrator of AlphaBay. On 12 July, Cazes apparently took his own life while in custody in Thailand. With online e-commerce booming in India, dark websites are threatening to emerge here too.