3 kilo cocaine worth Rs 20 crore seized, 3 Vietnamese held

NEW DELHI: The Narcotics Control Bureau seized 3kg of fine quality Colombian cocaine worth Rs 20 crore from a hotel in Paharganj and arrested three Vietnamese nationals, including a woman, on Saturday. This is the second such seizure in two weeks.
While the trio arrested have been identified as Thach Thi Thanh, 36, Phan Van Soan, 27, and Van Taon Do, 39, NCB officials are also looking for an African who had taken delivery of a part of the consignment from the Vietnamese carriers in the capital.
The woman, Thanh, and Soan had arrived at the Indira Gandhi International Airport from Addis Ababa on an Ethiopian Airlines flight on Friday. “They were each seen to be carrying just one handbag, which is fairly unusual for international passengers. So, we tracked them until they reached Paharganj,” said Rajinder Pal Singh, deputy director general, NCB.
At the hotel in Paharganj, where their associate Do had been staying since January 16, they stowed their luggage in Do’s room. It was then that the NCB team swooped in. The cocaine was found packed in plastic bags and pasted under the cardboard flap at the bottom of the hand bags, which were stuffed with clothes.
Thanh and Soan were in India on a multiple entry visa on passports that were issued recently, the authenticity of which is being probed by the Vietnamese embassy. They were scheduled to leave on Saturday. “It seems that they planned to bring another consignment to India using the same route,” said Madho Singh, zonal director (Delhi), NCB.
The trio were interrogated with the help of a translator from the embassy. Based on Do’s statement, follow-up action in his hotel room yielded 450 grams of methaqualone concealed in a carton box. The international value of the drug is estimated at Rs 20 lakh. The NCB sleuths discovered that Do had sold a part of the methaqualone stock to a man from an African country on January 18. Efforts are being made to identify the buyer.
Soan has confessed to having visited countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, Cambodia and Togo for drugs trafficking. He said he has been in the business since 2013. Carriers like him are paid between $4,000 and $5,000 for each shipment coming out of Peru, Bolivia and Colombia.
The NCB officials suspect that the seized cocaine was meant to be sent to suppliers in Delhi, Punjab and Mumbai through local dealers.