Delhi: Four foreign nationals held at IGI airport with party drug

Three women and a man, all foreign nationals, were on Saturday arrested at Terminal 3 of Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International airport with different quantities of the party drug pseudoephedrine. The narcotics control bureau nabbed them when they were trying to flee the country with the consignment.

Three women and a man, all foreign nationals, were on Saturday arrested at Terminal 3 of Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International airport with different quantities of the party drug pseudoephedrine.

Two of the accused (faces covered) who were nabbed from IGI Airport. (Sourced)

The narcotics control bureau nabbed them when they were trying to flee the country with the consignment.

Available cheaply in India, pseudoephedrine once smuggled out of the country is mixed with other substances to make Ice, a common party drug.

Over the past one month, investigation into most cases of pseudoephedrine use revealed that the drug is smuggled from the north-eastern states via Myanmar or Delhi.

In all the cases, the four arrested people were couriers, who were promised a fee for successfully evading law enforcement agencies and transporting the drug.

Taj Hasan, deputy director general, NCB said that on Saturday, they received intelligence about a woman who was carrying pseudoephedrine.

“Our offices from the Delhi zone, who were at the airport, spotted a woman coming to the airport in a taxi. On checking, we found around 17 kilograms of the drug in 12 different women’s wallets,” Hasan said.

The woman, a Zambian national, was flying to Addis Ababa and then to Zambia. NCB officers said they were on the lookout for the woman’s contact who delivered the drug to her in a city hotel.

Around 11.30 pm, a South African woman carrying around 5 kilograms of the drug was also intercepted by the airport.

The woman had built a special cavity in the base of her luggage, hoping it would pass undetected. NCB officials said the woman, who runs a saloon in SA, had come the country on July 13 to earn a few bucks by transporting the drug from India to South Africa.

In the third case, a woman from South Africa and a Nigerian national, a man, were arrested with around 10.4 kilogrammes of the same drug.

The woman, who had come to India on July 25, was a courier who was promised a cut for transporting the drug.