The Narcotics Control Bureau on Saturday made the “largest ever” drugs seizure of 2,500 kg of “high-purity” methamphetamine, priced worth Rs 15,000 crore, off the Kerala coast. A Pakistani national was detained in the joint raid by the drugs agency and the Indian Navy, officials said. The seizure was part of ‘Operation Samudragupt’ targeting maritime drug trafficking originating from Afghanistan.
According to NCB, the methamphetamine has been sourced from the ‘Death Crescent’ and is valued at Rs 15,000 crore in Indian waters. This is the first time an Indian agency has intercepted a “mother ship” carrying drugs.
“2,500 kg methamphetamine was seized off the Kerala coast in a joint operation by NCB and Indian Navy. This is the largest ever seizure by any drug enforcement agency in India. The market value of the drugs is around Rs 15,000 crore and the consignment was caught in Indian waters; it was heading for Sri Lanka. A total of three boats were apprehended, and two managed to escape under the cover of darkness,” NCB’s deputy director-general Sanjay Singh told CNN-News18.
The NCB suspects the boat to be of Pakistani origin. Officials said this was the third major seizure via the southern route over the past year and a half.
How did this seizure take place?
According to a press release, the NCB and the intelligence wing of the navy got inputs about the movement of a “mother ship” carrying a massive quantity of methamphetamine from the Makran coast. Mother ships are big sea-going vessels carrying large quantities of contraband for distribution to receiving vessels on the route.
The press release stated that the agencies mobilised their assets and kept a close watch over the inputs. The continuous intelligence collection and analysis resulted in identification of a highly probable route to be taken by the mother ship. The details of this were shared with the navy following which it deployed a ship in the vicinity, it said.
Based on these inputs, the navy intercepted a large sea-going vessel and recovered 134 sacks of narcotics. The seizure and a Pakistani national were brought to the Mattancherry wharf in Cochin and handed over to the NCB, which said it initiated a seizure procedure and found that all the packets contained methamphetamine.
What is Operation Samudragupt?
Operation Samudragupt was launched in January 2022 by the NCB director-general in view of the threat to national security from maritime drug trafficking of heroin and other narcotics in the Indian Ocean Region. The primary objective of the operation was to collect actionable inputs, which could identify ships carrying the contraband.
A press release said the joint operations team exchanged and gathered information from drug law enforcement agencies such as Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI), Gujarat anti-terror squad, intelligence wing of the Indian Navy among others. Earlier, under the operation, agencies seized 529 kg hashish, 221 kg of methamphetamine and 13 kg heroin in the high seas off the Gujarat coast, all sourced from Balochistan and Afghanistan, in February 2022. The operations team also intercepted an Iranian boat off the Kerala coast October 2022 from which a total of 200 kg high-grade heroin sourced from Afghanistan was seized while six Iranian drug traffickers were arrested.
The NCB said apart from these operations, the agency also shared real-time actionable information with Sri Lanka and Maldives, which resulted in seizure of 286 kg heroin and 128 kg methamphetamine as well as the arrest of 19 drug traffickers in two operations conducted by the Sri Lankan Navy in December 2022 and April 2023. A total of 4 kg heroin was also seized by Maldivian police in March 2023 along with the arrest of 5 traffickers, the agency said.
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