E-Paper
Overseas drug mafia: HC tells Punjab, Hry & UT cops to rope in MEA
The bench of justice Anoop Chitkara observed that these days, the trend of heroin being smuggled by the Indian drugs mafia from Pakistan’s border is more noticeable.
The Punjab and Haryana high court has advised law enforcement agencies to send reports on cross-border smuggling to the Union ministry of external affairs and bring to book criminals who are operating a drug smuggling racket from foreign lands.
The bench of justice Anoop Chitkara observed that these days, the trend of heroin being smuggled by the Indian drugs mafia from Pakistan’s border is more noticeable.
“Today, even the most advanced nations of the world are finding it increasingly difficult to counter and control the rising menace of illicit drug trafficking and resultant drug abuse. Thus, one step, that might be helpful to control the drug menace can be that whenever there is any involvement of foreign nationals operating from foreign land, or drugs operations from outside India, when the quantity of drugs is significant, the senior officers from the rank of SSP and above must communicate the gist of investigation along with the information about such foreign national to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,” the court advised, asking the registry to send the order to the Punjab, Haryana governments and the Chandigarh administration.
“It is for the ministry to consider whether to forward such details and information to the countries from which these criminals and mafias had carried out their operations,” it further added.
The observations were made during the hearing of a bail plea from one Seema, against whom an FIR was registered in Jalandhar in June 2024. It had come to fore during the hearing that there were eight other FIRs registered against her since 2002.
In the present case, the police had claimed that, based on a chance recovery, the cops seized 1kg of heroin from the possession of co-accused Satish Suman. During the investigation, Suman disclosed that he used to procure heroin from Amritsar and Tarn Taran under the instructions of one Lucky, who is presently residing in the USA. Suman also disclosed that after delivering heroin to customers, he used to hand over drug proceeds to Lucky’s wife, Neha, and had also sold heroin to the petitioner, Seema.
The court found that although the recovery was not from the petitioner, there was sufficient prima facie digital evidence connecting her with the main accused, from whom 1 kg of heroin was recovered. Also, during the police probe, she had admitted that she was in touch with Lucky, who is operating a drug cartel from the US.
The court dismissed the plea and directed the senior superintendent of police, Jalandhar, to send details of the information along with the phone numbers of Lucky to the concerned secretary of the ministry of foreign affairs to enable them to consider communicating such inputs to their counterparts and inform the US about the accused’s involvement in heroin trafficking.
