Hawala racket busted, 3 held in Amritsar
PK Jaiswar
Amritsar, February 20
The Amritsar rural police on Tuesday busted a hawala racket being operated from Dubai by arresting three persons. The arrest has been made after the interrogation of drug smuggler Vishal Singh of Attari, who was nabbed four days ago.
The police have seized Rs 55.90 lakh from them. Those arrested were Rajiv Jain of Garden Enclave here, Gurpreet Singh of Ferozepur and Anokh Singh of Sidhwa Beit village in Jagraon.
Satinder Singh, SSP, Amritsar rural police, said Vishal Singh of Attari, was arrested with 900gm of contraband. His bank account was also freezed by the police. He said several more names had cropped up during the investigation and raids were on to nab them.
Police sources revealed that Rajiv, Gurpreet and Anokh were in touch with a US-based hawala operator Vicky. His credentials were being looked into.
So far, the police had arrested eight members of the drug and hawala racket in past one week and seized 4.4kg of heroin along with three cars, an SUV and a tractor.
On February 12, the police arrested two drug traffickers – Sarwan Singh of Ladhewal Havelian and Sukhdev Singh of Baghrian village – from Gharinda. The police team had also seized 2kg of heroin from their possession at that time.
Their interrogation led the police to arrest Vishal Singh of Attari on February 16 who used to supply the contraband to them. The same day, the police arrested Harmeet Singh and Hari Singh, both residents of Narli and Sur Singh village in Tarn Taran district. They were part of the Dubai-based drug cartel. Their arrest led to the recovery of another 1.5kg heroin along with on .32 bore pistol and a tractor.
According to the police, Harmeet Singh and Hari Singh had returned from Dubai around two months back. They were in touch with Bantu of Mehta, who is in Dubai and running the drug cartel. The duo had returned from Dubai for establishing the drug racket at the behest of Bantu. As per initial probe, they had sneaked in several heroin consignments from Pakistan and supplied it further to different parts of Punjab.
