Hashish pops out as officials make drug-peddler poop

KOLKATA: For someone who has lived in a slum all hislife, a two-day stay in a centrally air-conditioned comfort should be like a dream-come-true. But for Arshad Ali, a resident of Kidderpore, it is turning out to be quite a pain. Forced into a bizarre diet of bananas and purgatives, Arshad has spent more time in the toilet than in the detention room where customs officers have kept him confined since Monday morning.
The 23-year-old youth, booked on a Biman Bangladesh flight to Hong Kong via Dhaka, had cleared immigration and was headed for security check ahead of the security lounge when customs officers stepped in.Acting on a tip-off, they frisked him thoroughly and searched his cabin luggage but failed to find contraband drugs on him.
"The officers were baffled when they could not detect the contraband as the tip-off had come from a very reliable source. After some deliberation, they decided to interrogate him," said a source.
On sustained grilling, Arshad cracked. What he said left everyone stunned. Arshad, who earned his living by repairing cellphones, had recently been contacted by a Kidderpore-based businessman to traffic drugs to nightclubs in Hong Kong. Just before leaving for the airport, Arshad was handed 20 plastic-coated capsules and asked to swallow them.
"The Hashish is stashed in the capsules. I had been told to check into a hotel in Hong Kong where I would be given medicine to throw up the pills," Arshad told the interrogators.
Customs officers knew they had to extract the pills from Arshad`s stomach to make a case against him. But the question was how. On consulting a doctor at the airport, the physician prescribed a purgative and lots of bananas. They made Arshad down the purgative and gorge on bananas. Soon, the results began to show. The pills popped out, one by one. Till reports last came in, 11 capsules had been extracted.
Arshad was produced in court on Wednesday and remanded to judicial custody. The police are on the lookout for the Kidderpore businessman who handed the drugs to him.