With the Punjab Police tightening the noose around drug smuggling, the drug peddlers or suppliers are now adopting new ways to evade arrests by selling drugs in very little quantities — in milligrams and grams — to avoid detection.
“One latest trend has come to fore wherein drug smugglers smuggled drugs by concealing them in onion-loaded trucks to avoid the stink,” said the state’s Inspector General of Police (IGP), Headquarters, Sukhchain Singh Gill, while addressing the weekly press conference on Tuesday.
IGP said that recently, it has also been observed that supply from Abohar and Ferozepur sides is increasing and drug suppliers are now preferring public transport to smuggle drugs, to avoid checking. “Intoxicant tablets are majorly being supplied from Uttar Pradesh-Delhi side from areas of Saharanpur, Ghaziabad, Bahadurgarh via Haryana, while opium and poppy husk are mostly coming from Madhya Pradesh-Rajasthan side,” he added.
IGP Gill said that the Punjab Police, besides tightening the noose around the drug smugglers or suppliers, have also waged war against anti-social elements and gangsters.
He informed that the Punjab Police have arrested 327 drug smugglers or suppliers after registering 230 first information reports (FIRs), including 31 commercial, under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act across the state in the past one week. During the same period, the Police have also arrested 43 Proclaimed Offenders (POs) or absconders in NDPS Act cases.
IGP Gill said that the Police have also recovered 11.73 kg heroin, 20 kg opium, 9 kg ganja, 5.76 quintals of poppy husk, and 28,000 tablets, capsules, injections or vials of Pharma opioids besides recovering Rs 20.07 lakh drug money after carrying out cordon and search operations in drug-affected areas beside laying nakas at vulnerable routes across the State.
Since Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann-led Punjab Government came to power, Punjab Police teams have successfully busted 67 criminal modules and arrested 301 gangsters besides neutralizing two dreaded gangsters in the encounter and recovered 640 weapons along with 174 magazines and 3364 cartridges from their possession. Apart from this, the Police teams have also recovered seven hand-grenades and five IEDs, he added.
Meanwhile, the DGP has strictly ordered all the Commissioners of Police (CPs) or Senior Superintendent of Police (SSPs) to further tighten the noose around the drug smugglers by identifying all top drug smugglers and the hotspots infamous for drug smuggling in their jurisdictions and launching a combing operation to nab all those selling or smuggling drugs.
He also directed the Police chiefs to effectively forfeit the property of all the arrested drug smugglers so that their ill-gotten money could be recovered.