Chandigarh: The Punjab police on Monday claimed to have busted a cross-border drug smuggling racket being operated by USA-based smuggler Sarwan Singh with the arrest of a drug trafficker and recovered 12 kg heroin from his possession.
According to police, Sarwan Singh, who is carrying Rs 2 lakh reward on his arrest, is a brother of notorious drug smuggler Ranjeet alias Cheeta and is wanted in a 532-kg heroin haul case, in which the latter was arrested in May 2020. Cheeta was the mastermind behind the smuggling of 532 packets of heroin which were seized by customs department at Integrated Check Post (ICT), Attari, Amritsar, in July 2019 and is being investigated by the NIA.
Director General of Police (DGP), Punjab, said that the arrested drug smuggler had been identified as Rahul of Naraingarh in Amritsar.
Apart from seizing heroin, the police teams have also impounded his Honda car, in which he was travelling. DGP Yadav said that following intel inputs that associates of Sarwan Singh had retrieved the heroin consignment dropped via drone and they were going to deliver it to someone, the state special operation cell (SSOC), Amritsar, conducted a special police checking in the city area of Amritsar, and arrested Rahul after recovering 12 packets of heroin, weighing 1 kg each, from his car. The DGP said that as per preliminary investigations, the accused was directly in touch with USA-based smuggler Sarwan and was supplying heroin across the state after importing it from Pakistan.
Sharing more details, AIG, SSOC, Amritsar, Sukhminder Singh Mann said that further investigations were being conducted to probe the backward and forward linkages and unearth the whole network of drug suppliers, dealers and their buyers.
