Interstate drug racket busted; ganja worth Rs 42 lakh seized

Bengaluru: The Cottonpet police have arrested six interstate drug smugglers and seized 53.5 kg of ganja worth Rs 42 lakh in western Bengaluru.

The arrested are Shankar Lal, 38, from Rajasthan; Anirudh Dalai, 38, from Odisha; Basant Kumar, 35, and Ajith Kumar Singh, 43, both from Jharkhand; and Deepak Kumar, 27, and Amarnath Jaiswal, 61, both from Bihar.

Jaiswal had a drug case in Delhi in 2019. The others have no criminal history.

The police made the breakthrough on July 12 after seizing 53.5 kg ganja from a goods auto near a hospital in Cottonpet. Lal revealed they were smuggling drugs from Visakhapatnam to Bengaluru via bus and cargo.

In Bengaluru, the gang repackaged the ganja in boxes labelled as garments, using fake GST bills, and sent it to Delhi, Pune, and Hyderabad. Each suspect had specific roles in managing the cargo.

Among the recovered items were the contraband, nine mobile phones, 10 SIM cards, a laptop, one goods autorickshaw, and eight fake GST bills.

The police have alerted their counterparts in Delhi, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Telangana, and Jharkhand, and involved the Narcotics Control Bureau as well.