Hyderabad drugs racket: Private buses are used to transport drugs to Chennai

Hyderabad: Manufacturing narcotic drugs is the first part of the drug business which drug dealers can safely do from small private labs in Hyderabad. But once the product is ready, private buses are used by drug racketeers to transport them to Chennai from Hyderabad.

The drug peddler travels as an ordinary passenger and dumps his drugs-filled-bags along with the other passengers’ luggage, thereby not making anyone suspicious. The drug is usually transported to other Asian countries from Chennai port. The manufacturer based in Hyderabad gets 500 percent profit from each kg of meth he smuggles out of the country.

There are more than 30s AC and non-AC buses plying to Chennai every day from Hyderabad. The luggage and baggage of passengers kept in the bus’ trunk are never checked by any security agency or the travel company management. Hundreds of kgs can be easily smuggled out of the city without anyone getting wiser, least of all the enforcement agencies.

“When we arrested one of the gang members earlier, he was on his way to Chennai. He had booked a bus ticket and was planning to take all the packed drugs as his luggage. In the interrogation, he confessed it was the usual way of racketeers to transport drugs from one state to another”, said a senior official from Cyberabad SOT.

The smuggling is not just one-way. To manufacture the drugs in Hyderabad, often large amounts of raw material are brought in from Chennai and other cities, usually in the same way. “Sometimes more than a hundred kgs of chemicals like ephedrine is smuggled into the city through these buses from Chennai and Maharashtra”, a source said.

In most cases, the private bus operators are not aware of the smuggling since they do not check the luggage of the passengers. However, few operators are hand in glove with the racketeers and do this willingly to earn some extra bucks, police officials say.

It's impossible to check every bus leaving from Hyderabad. “Only through tip-offs can we catch these smugglers. Few gangs even use men from the general public to transport the drugs by paying them. The passenger is contacted by an anonymous person when he reaches Chennai, where the higher strata of the racket manage the second stage of smuggling”, said an SOT official.

The south-east Asian drug cartels use Hyderabad as a base to manufacture drugs. Secret labs are active in the industrial villages, where enforcement agencies have very poor vigilance.

Though not completely refined, meth made in Hyderabad labs have been sold for thousands of dollars in the international market. Cops claim that the smuggled Hyderabadi meth is spruced up further when it reaches places in Malaysia and Singapore.