The seized Phensedyl bottles on Wednesday. Picture by UB Photos

Sept. 12: More than 8,000 bottles of Phensedyl cough syrup valued at around Rs 7 lakh were seized in two raids conducted here since last night.

A team of CID officials recovered 6,300 bottles of the cough syrup from a house at Birubari last night.

Two persons — Ashwini Kumar Das, 39, of Birubari and Rupam Roy, 30 — both hailing from East Agartala in Tripura have been arrested.

A police source said the Bangladesh-bound consignment of the cough syrup was recovered from the rented house of Das at Birubari and based on his confession, Roy was picked up from hotel Gitanjali at Paltan Bazar.

According to the source, the value of the consignment would be around Rs 5.5 lakh.

“The Phensedyl bottles were packed inside 18 jute sacks,” the source said.

The source said Roy was supposed to take the Phensedyl bottles to Agartala from where it would have been smuggled to Bangladesh, where the cough syrup containing codeine has high demand.

He said Roy had confessed during interrogation that he had brought the consignment from Calcutta and planning to smuggle it to Bangladesh.

The source claimed the accused duo were involved in Phesedyl smuggling for the past four years.

“It is widely abused by addicts in Bangladesh where the cough syrup is sold at three times higher price than the MRP,” he said.

The CID registered a case under Sections 379, 411 and 27 of the Drugs and Cosmetics Act against the duo and produced them in the court of chief judicial magistrate, Kamrup, here today.

Though the investigation agency had sought their weeklong custody for interrogation, the court reduced it to five days.

In another incident, sleuths of the customs department seized an unclaimed consignment of Phensedyl from the inter-state bus terminus at Betkuchi this morning.

“Acting on specific information, we seized 1,900 bottles of Phensedyl from the bus terminus but nobody has been arrested so far,” a source said.

According to him, the approximate value of the consignment will be around Rs 1.5 lakh. The bottles were packed inside 60 rolls of photo films.

“We seized the consignment when it was about to be loaded on a Silchar-bound bus and efforts are on to track down the sender and the intended receiver,” he said.

He said the sleuths suspect the consignment was going to Bangladesh via Silchar.

“There are some well organised rackets, which are smuggling the cough syrup across the border,” the source said.