The arrested drug peddlers at the excise office in Bhubaneswar on Wednesday. Picture by Ashwinee Pati

Bhubaneswar, Nov. 13: Excise officials today arrested two drug peddlers from Lakshmisagar and seized 70 grams of heroin worth around Rs 9 lakh from them.

An officer said the two arrested — Sk Mustaq Ahmed, 38, and Pramod Kumar Mohanty, 24 — sold the contraband mostly to engineering students at Chandrasekharpur.

Ahmed, a native of Bengal, has been staying in the city for 10 years and works as a manufacturer of iron grills. Mohanty owns a grocery shop at Lakshmisagar. While 50 grams of heroin was found from Ahmed’s possession, the remaining 20 grams was with Mohanty.

“We had been keeping a tab on both of them for the past one month. We also came to know about other persons involvement in contraband sale,” said excise inspector H. Sethy.

An official said the accused used to procure the contraband from Bengal and sell it in half-a-gram packets.

“Both of them used to sell the small packets for Rs 150 each and their target consumers were students, especially the engineering students. They also revealed the names of engineering colleges, where they used to sell it,” he said.

Sources said the narcotics were being sold in parts of Lakshmisagar, Baramunda and a few slums, including Salia Sahi. In June, the excise officials had seized heroin weighing 1.5kg worth Rs 1.5 crore from Puri and arrested one person. The supply chain of the narcotics was also linked to Bhubanes-war. The sleuths had seized more than 500 grams of brown sugar from a person in Cuttack in August 2010.