Further investigations into the Delhi-based multi-crore international synthetic drug racket have revealed the staggering volumes of precursor chemicals and synthetic drugs smuggled by the racketeers which are worth over Rs 2,000 crore in the international market.
It has also been revealed that the kingpin of the Delhi-based racket Dev Behl was an associate of underworld don Dawood Ibrahim and his brother Anees in gold smuggling.
Disclosing this, Hardyal Singh Mann, SSP, Patiala said that Dev Behl, the drug racket kingpin was a man in his 50s and started his criminal career in the early 1980s. For five years from 1983 up to 1988, he was operating an international gold smuggling syndicate along with Anees, brother of Dawood Ibrahim on the directions of Dawood Ibrahim himself.
Mann informed Dev had met Anees and Dawood many times during the course of the gold smuggling racket. He maintained social contact with Dawood Ibrahim even after their partnership broke-up in 1988. He even went to Dubai for meeting Dawood. This gold smuggling racket was operated on a massive scale with 8-10 kilos of gold being smuggled on a monthly basis, added Mann.
The SSP said Dev Behl had revealed in his interrogation that due to business differences with Anees and also due to the fact that gold smuggling did not remain as lucrative as before, he quit the gold smuggling and in order to convert his ill-gotten gains from criminal activities into white money started a sale/purchase business of second-hand cars. He said it was not long before Dev Behl again ventured into criminal enterprise.
According to the preliminary investigations, Dev started operating drug racket in the year 2000. Mann pointed out that according preliminary estimates, Dev and his associates obtained at least 1,500 kilo of precursor chemicals and converted them into synthetic drugs like Ice through the manufacturing process in factories in HP and other places, and, smuggled the synthetic drugs to Canada. In 2004, Dev obtained 700 kilo of pseudoephedrine from Hyderabad, manufactured Ice from it and pumped the synthetic drug (Ice) in the international market.
The SSP said investigations have revealed that recently Dev Behl was working on one of his largest orders so far — supply of 300 kilo of Ice to be routed through Nairobi, Kenya, Africa- a single contraband consignment that was worth Rs 1,500 crore in the international market. However, his luck ran out and he was nabbed by police before the contraband consignment could be prepared fully and delivered.