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A team from MGM police station on Sunday arrested a youth from Bhubaneswar for his alleged involvement in smuggling cannabis to Delhi.
Santosh Biswal, 35 — who works for a well-known courier company on the outskirts of the Odisha capital — was rounded up from his house at Chakeisiani. City police had been on his trail ever since a major haul of the contraband in Jamshedpur six days ago.
The MGM crackdown team, aided by Mancheswar police, produced the employee of Gati-Kintetsu Express Private Limited in Bhubaneswar court in the afternoon before taking him on transit remand.
MGM police had raided a depot of the courier firm in Jamshedpur on January 14 after they were tipped off about parcels containing cannabis (ganja) and being transported to Delhi.
“We found a packet containing 46kg ganja that was being transported in a vehicle of the company. The contraband had been shaped into small bricks and packed in a bag. The sender’s address was a company selling handloom products in Bhubaneswar, while the receiver was named as Lakhan Singh at Kirari in New Delhi,” said the officer in charge of the raiding team.
He said that Biswal, a contractual worker engaged by the company’s branch at Phulnakhara, had received the parcel in Bhubaneswar and despatched it to Delhi.
So, they detained him and tried to trace the sender’s address — mentioned on the parcel as Maa Charchika Handloom Goods in Sahid Nagar — but it was found to be false.
“When asked for the real address, Biswal kept on giving us the fake one. We suspected his hand in sending the packet and that he was trying to mislead us,” said the officer.
The accused claimed that as the courier firm’s office had no facilities for opening and checking packets, he had only received and despatched them. “I had seen the man, who I knew only by his name, Ashok, coming to our office several times with packets.”
Another police team from the steel city is in Delhi to further probe the case.
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