Boat seizure a blessing for Pak crew

Manas Dasgupta

Ahmedabad, April 24

The seizure of the Pakistani boat with narcotics worth over Rs 600 crores off the Porbandar coast in the Saurashtra region of Gujarat earlier this week has turned out to be a blessing in disguise for its eight arrested crew members.

They might have been drowned in the high seas if not intercepted by the Indian navy and coast guard in a joint operations as the boat had developed technical snags and was fast sinking, official sources said here today.

Interrogations of the eight crew members arrested from the boat revealed that the contraband was shipped by a Pakistan-based group called Punjabi drug gang and the 232 packages of narcotics was to be delivered to a vessel coming from Dubai but it failed to reach the destination at the appointed time.

The crew members were waiting in the high seas for over two-and-a-half days for the vessel from Dubai to arrive and it was during that period that the boat developed technical snags and started sinking. Its water pumping system failed and the crew members had to manually drain out water but the task was going to be beyond their capacity.

Sources in the Gujarat police, which is one of the 20 agencies jointly interrogating the arrested crew who were brought to Porbandar, said the group looked to be unprofessional in drugs operation.

“Otherwise they would not have ventured out with such a rickety boat and untrained crew members,” the sources said. The contraband carried by it was also of relatively inferior quality.

The boat, Al Yazir, had set out from Karachi’s Hyderi Port on April 12 with two crewmen and 232 packets of narcotics. Six others hopped in later at Ketty Bandar some 150 km south of Karachi.

Soon after starting from Ketty port, the boat’s radiator and dynamo conked off and the crew had to take shelter at a small creek a few miles away for two days till the captain managed to get the boat repaired.