How Delhi, Mumbai traders turned into drug dealers

NEW DELHI: Rajesh Dutta, a cigarette exporter based in Rajendra Nagar,

turned

into a kingpin of an international drug syndicate some seven years ago after being introduced by a common friend to Satish Sahu, a clothes trader from Mumbai. At that time, Sahu was trying to enter the drug trade and reap huge profits by tapping the UK market.

One of Sahu friends, who used to supply Viagra to a firm in UK, connected him to the owners of pharmaceutical companies who supplied the initial raw materials to Dutta, said DCP (special cell) Sanjeev Yadav.

The duo then set up a unit at a friend's house in Delhi and produced 1kg Ketamine that was supplied to UK through a friend. Overwhelmed by the response of the sale, Dutta started spreading the business gradually to other parts of Europe.

Dutta's friend, Jaspreet Singh Dhillon, who owns night clubs in Nepal and Malaysia, was the first to contact them for supplying Meow Meow, which was in high demand in these countries. He then rented his friend Neeraj Arora's house in Hari Nagar to produce the drugs from the raw materials supplied by Sahu. Dutta knew how to create the drugs from the raw materials after synthesis. He taught the process to Arora, a chemist by profession, to produce it in huge quantities.

Initially, Arora prepared 1kg Ketamine and delivered it to his friend Vishal, a resident of Naraina, who eventually became one of their prime suppliers.

During interrogation, one of the arrested men, Sunil Kumar, told police that he had been trafficking drugs to Europe through his courier service for the past six years. He used to source the drugs from Dutta. He was arrested by Customs in 2015 while trying to export Meow Meow to London. He was jailed for two years and was released on bail in 2018.

When Kumar came out of jail, he and his courier partner Lokesh Mehta got in touch with Mazhar, a Pak national based in London, and started sending him the contraband concealed in miscellaneous goods. Police have contacted other agencies to get to Mazhar.
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