The ATS team raided a pharmaceutical facility in the Dahej industrial region of Bharuch district, Gujarat, on August 5 and 6, and they also raided a mephedrone production business in Thane district, Maharashtra.
Ahmedabad: On Wednesday, the Gujarat Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) said that it had conducted two major raids in the state and the neighboring state of Maharashtra, resulting in the seizure of narcotics valued at over Rs. 800 crore. According to officials, four people who were reportedly involved in the manufacturing and distribution of illegal drugs were also taken into custody by the team during the operation.
According to police, the ATS team raided a pharmaceutical facility in the Dahej industrial region of Bharuch district, Gujarat, and a mephedrone manufacturing unit in Thane district, Maharashtra, on August 5 and 6. The ATS teams carried out the operations precisely, and they were predicated on certain intelligence inputs.
An ATS squad stormed a residence in Bhiwandi town, Thane, and detained two brothers, Muhammad Yunus Shaikh (41), and his brother, Muhammad Adil Shaikh (34), according to the officials.
According to ATS authorities, the two were discovered in possession of around 800 kg of liquid mephedrone, or MD, which is worth at Rs. 800 crore on the international market.
According to the ATS, the two had rented the property around eight months prior in order to use different chemicals to make mephedrone. They failed in their first try, but by the time of the raid, the second batch was nearly ready to be turned into powder.
Following a prior operation on July 18, when a mephedrone production factory in the Palsana region of Surat city was busted, narcotics and raw materials worth Rs. 51.4 crore were confiscated, and three people were detained, the ATS started looking into the Shaikh brothers’ operations.
According to police, these people confessed during questioning that the Shaikh brothers were involved with the drug cartel, which is what made the operation in Bhiwandi effective.
In the second operation, the ATS raided a pharmaceutical facility in Dahej GIDC and found two people in possession of Rs. 31 crore’s worth of liquid tramadol.
Pankaj Rajput and Nikhil Kapuria were named as the people who were taken into custody. In 2018, it was discovered that Rajput, the factory’s principal chemist, and Kapuria, the proprietor of a chemical trading company, were manufacturing tramadol, an opioid painkiller that the NDPS Act designated as a psychotropic drug.
According to investigations, Kapuria persuaded Rajput to produce tramadol using raw ingredients purchased from an Ahmedabad-based company run by a guy named Harshad Kukadiya. According to ATS authorities, when the liquid Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient (API) was prepared, it was transferred to Kukadiya, who subsequently carried it to a plant in Gandhinagar for the manufacturing of tablets.
More people implicated in this scheme are being sought after, according to authorities.
On July 29, in Mundra port in Gujarat’s Kutch area, the Customs agency found 6.8 million tramadol pills valued at Rs. 110 crore in two export containers.