The Kochi police are hoping to get out of the credibility crisis they had suffered after the blood samples of a new generation film actor and four young women held for drug abuse tested negative for cocaine with the arrest last week of a Nigerian drug peddler from Goa who had allegedly supplied the ‘stuff’ to one of the young women.
The Nigerian, Okowe Chigozie Collins (29), arrested from Goa on March 4 in a joint operation by a police team from Kochi and the Goa police, was on Saturday remanded in judicial custody till March 19 by the Ernakulam Principal Sessions Court, Kochi. He was brought to Kochi on Friday on a transit warrant issued by a court in Goa.
According to Francis Shelbi, Circle Inspector of Police, Ernakulam Central, Collins had arrived in Kochi from Goa on January 30 by a train to be received by 26-year-old designer Reshma Rangaswamy, first accused in the cocaine case, at the Ernakulam South Railway Station and had handed the stuff over to her at the luxury apartment from where she and the others were arrested.
Reshma was arrested from the flat in an early morning raid on January 31 along with three other women — Bangalore-based assistant film director Blessy Sylvester (22), model Tinsy Babu (25) and travel firm owner Sneha Babu (26) — and new generation Malayalam film actor Shine Tom Chacko on charges of abusing and possessing cocaine.
According to the police, they came to know of the role of the Nigerian after examining the call history of Reshma’s cell phone. They had also come across some CCTV footage from the Ernakulam South Railway Station in which Reshma was seen receiving the Nigerian.
Shelbi said that Reshma, from whom seven grams of cocaine was seized during the raid on the flat owned by controversial businessman Muhammad Nisham who had murdered a security guard, had admitted to the police during interrogation in the jail where they were lodged that a Nigerian had supplied the drug to her.
“I don’t know anything,” shouted Collins to media persons when he was brought to Kochi on Friday afternoon. Collins, arrested from a cottage in Chopdem, Goa where he was staying with seven other Nigerians, was earlier booked in Goa for visa overstaying.
Collins is said to have told the Kochi Police that his source of the cocaine was an international drug-trafficker known in the names of Ali and Frank and that he had left India two weeks ago. Reshma and Blessy had come across the Nigerian when they were in Goa in December-January.
The police had claimed earlier that Reshma and Blessy had told them that the drug was sourced from a person named Franco on a Goa beach. On the basis of this information, they had taken the two women to Goa on an evidence-gathering exercise immediately after their arrest. However, the team had to return empty-handed.