Jaswant Singh Gandam
All the four operatives of the Pakistan-backed narcotics smuggling module including a woman, arrested Tuesday night with 16.8 kg heroin were Wednesday produced in a local Court that remanded them into five-day police custody.
Kapurthala Senior Superintendent of Police(SSP) Gaurav Toora told a press conference here this afternoon that these operatives included Balwinder Singh alias Raju of Pandori mohalla in Sultanpur Lodhi,Sumanpreet Kaur alias Priya of Gohalwar in Taran Taran,Jaskaranbir Singh alias Jas and Harpal Singh,both of village Dauke in Amritsar district.
Apart from recovering a huge heroin haul,police also impounded a Baleno car they were traveling in and seized some mobiles, said Toora.
Phagwara Sub-divisional Superintendent of Police(SP) Smt Madhvi Sharma and DSP Bharat Bhushan were also present.
Claiming that during their preliminary questioning the operatives have confessed their links in other districts,Toora said that thorough investigations were on inorder to unravel those links.
Claiming further that their arrest has caused a major blow to trans-border drug trafficking network amidst the ongoing war against drugs in the state,Toora said that the consignement was smuggled from across the border via drones and was meant for Chandigarh.
“Two foreign-based handlers backed by Pakistan,with the involvement of a Dubai-based one are behind the module and in all probability the Dubai handler managed its financial side through havala transactions”, he remarked.
He said,”We have got an information from Amritsar police that drug smugglers are heading towards Phagwara with a drug consignment meant to be delivered in Chandigarh.We laid muliti-layered ‘nakas’ on Mehtan-Mehli Phagwara bypass with an initial one at the bend of GT road near Mehtan towards Palahi last night inorder to intercept the smugglers.When the police party signalled them to stop their car,they hit the party and attempted to run over it in order to escape.In a hot chase,a cop had to fire at the back tyre of the car for puncturing it to a halt.Even after it,they locked car’s window panes from inside and police had to break these glasses for getting them out and recovering the huge consignment”.
SSP Toora asserted that police will unravel the complete chain of smugglers through multiple angle investigation and bust the module completely.
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