30-kg heroin seizure case: Gursimranjit sent to police custody

Gursimranjit Singh, alias Simran, of Basarke Gillan village, who was nabbed by the Amritsar rural police with a large haul of drugs, has been sent to police custody for five days by the local court here on Saturday.

He was arrested by the Gharinda police with 30 kg of heroin on Friday. The police were trying to establish links between him and other three suspects whose names cropped up during a preliminary probe.

The contraband was smuggled through big drones such as hexacopters capable of carrying a payload from 5kg to 10 kg, investigations revealed. The police have confiscated four packets containing heroin weighing around 7.5 kg each. Usually, the Pakistan-based state and non-state actors were using small size quadcopters with a payload capacity of up to 1-kg.

Investigations revealed that Gursimranjit had not retrieved the seized heroin from near the Indo-Pak border. Some unknown person had delivered him the consignment on a scooter.

The cross-border drug cartel was being operated by US-based drug peddler Raju Dhattal, who originally hailed from Gharinda area. Gursimranjit and Dhattal did not have any previous criminal record.

Amritsar rural police Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Charanjit Singh Sohal said in the past three months, he had retrieved four drug consignments of around 75 kg each. Apart from heroin, the police also impounded Simran’s car in which he was carrying the consignment.

Police sources said the police have also seized the mobile phone of Gursimranjit which was forensically examined to expose the entire backward and forward links.