Drug peddler held, 36kg cannabis recovered after search operation
Ambika Sharma
Solan, May 11
The Solan police achieved a major breakthrough when it nabbed a key drug peddler, Jhabe Ram, a resident of Kohila village in Kullu, after an extensive operation spanning over 29 hours in the forests of Anni in Kullu yesterday.
“The Solan police is maintaining a strict surveillance on drug smugglers operating in the district as well as those transiting through the district. Drug smuggling has become a major problem, following which the activities of the key drug networks were probed and they were found to be quite active for the past several years,” said Solan SP Gaurav Singh.
A 19-member joint team of Solan police’s Detection Cell and Dharampur police station, led by IPS probationer Abhishek Kaundal, conducted an extensive raid in the forest yesterday and searched the area for nearly 29 hours.
Around 36 kg high-quality cannabis, priced at Rs 5 crore in the international market, was recovered. This is amongst the highest seizures in recent times. The search operation was still underway, informed the SP.
The Detection Cell of Solan police had arrested a cannabis smuggler, Harjeet Singh (38), a resident of Rampur district of Uttar Pradesh, on May 9. He was arrested with 1.30 kg cannabis found in his car on the Subathu-Dharampur road. A case was registered under Section 20 of the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act (NDPS) Act at Dharampur police station. While tracing his antecedents, the police found that he was involved in large-scale smuggling of drugs.
While tracing the backward linkages of the case, it was found that Harjeet was taking this contraband as a sample to finalise a bigger drug deal. The source of this consignment was traced and it was found that the gang was smuggling cannabis on a large scale from Anni area of Kullu, transiting it through Solan district and supplying it to Haryana, Delhi, Chandigarh, Mumbai, Goa, etc. In a bid to avoid detection, the drug peddlers used the lesser used routes while travelling from Anni to Shimla.
While probing the case further, the raiding team found the main supplier, Jhabe Ram, had been involved in drug smuggling for a decade. As per preliminary investigations, a case under the NDPS was registered against him in 2018 in Mandi district for smuggling 40 kg poppy husk.
The police suspects the involvement of more than 250 people in this drug racket and further probe was underway.
Since 2023, the Solan police have arrested over 100 accused from other states, including 86 big suppliers of cigarettes/drugs from states such as Delhi, Punjab, Haryana, Chandigarh, Uttar Pradesh, Assam, Maharashtra, etc, and eight Nigerian citizens.
More than 25 big inter-state heroin smuggling networks being run in Himachal Pradesh by smugglers from other states have been destroyed. Due to this, the supply of heroin to thousands of youth has been curbed to a large extent.
