Cops track marijuana trail to Orissa

In a covert operation which started with a marijuana trail, a team of five Delhi police officials camped in Bhubaneshwar are busy tracking Babli, a leading carrier of the contraband from Orissa to break the marijuana supply in the city.

The name of Babli cropped up twice — once in 2015 and again recently when the crime branch unearthed an inter-state marijuana racket and a man named Babli turned out to be their source, senior officials said.

The marijuana was sent here with a consignment of mangoes which, investigators say, is the modus operandi of the Orissa module.

A senior police official said modules in Orissa and Andhra Pradesh have emerged to be the major marijuana suppliers in Delhi, with large tracts of land in dense forests there being used for cultivation of the same.

While the Orissa module dispatches marijuana, hiding them in trucks transporting fruits and vegetables across India, the Andhra module primarily uses heavy vehicles to transport contraband hiding it under a minimum layer of eatables.

Hence, as far as logistics are concerned, the frequency of transportation is higher for the Orissa module and lower for that of Andhra, which prefers sending marijuana in bulk, the officer said.

In the Orissa module, the Delhi police traced several “carriers” — identified as Sonu, Prabhat, Ajmeri, etc. — but succeeded in tracking none. Babli is the latest of them.

Carriers are the intermediaries between the peddlers who bring the contraband here and the investors who put money on marijuana cultivation in the source states, the senior official said.

Earlier in May, a trucker and a peddler, destined to Varanasi, were arrested and Babli emerged as their main source.