Kolkata Police have seized a large consignment of Yaba tablets – a party drug – worth around Rs 2.5 crore in the international grey market.
A preliminary investigation revealed that the consignment was to be smuggled out to Bangladesh. Two people have been arrested in this connection, police said.
Smuggling of Yaba tablets has shot up since 2019 across the porous Indo-Bangladesh border in south Bengal, after the Border Security Force (BSF) cracked down on cattle smuggling.
Acting on a tip-off, officers of the city police’s Special Task Force (STF) conducted a raid and arrested two Murshidabad-based drug peddlers from Garden Reach in the western parts of Kolkata. Murshidabad district is located along the international border in south Bengal.
“Around 50,000 tablets were seized from the peddlers. Further investigation is going on,” said a senior officer.
Earlier in February, two drug dealers from Manipur were arrested by the STF from south Kolkata with Yaba tablets worth Rs 2.3 crore in the black market. The consignment was seized from a car.
A mixture of methamphetamine and caffeine and sold as red or pink pills, Yaba originated in Myanmar and entered the Bangladesh black market in early 2000 and gained instant popularity due to the paucity of such stimulants locally. The fact that it was cheap also helped.
Till June this year, despite the lockdown, BSF personnel of south Bengal frontier have seized around 28,690 such tablets. In 2019, between January and June the BSF seized around 29,180 tablets. In 2018, no such consignments were sized till June.\
Source: Hindustan Times
WhatsApp us