Two links in a suspected hawala network were arrested in the city early last week. Unaccounted money to the tune of Rs.10.20 lakh was seized from them. The money was handed over to the court, while the two have been remanded.
The case, according to a police officer, will soon be transferred from the City police, most probably to the Income Tax Department or the Enforcement Directorate (ED).
This has been the pattern in most of the hawala rackets busted in the city, three of them in the past one year to be precise. However, the fact is that, even as more and more such rackets continue to be busted in the city, the actual source of the cash and the people behind the business still remain at large.
“In almost all the cases we busted in the city, those arrested were just carriers, who knew nothing more than telephone numbers, from which they got calls and were told from where to collect money or where to hand it over. There were a few names, mostly from Malappuram or Kozhikode, and from there, the trail mostly went abroad. But once we hand over the case to the ED, our role is mostly over. Getting to the source has been impossible, so far,” a senior police officer said.
Among the three cases in the city, last week’s seizure was the smallest in terms of cash. In October last year, the City police had arrested one person and seized from him nearly Rs.60 lakh. On that occasion, it was one Nizamuddin, a native of Kilimanoor living at Karamana who was nabbed from the Karamana bus-stand when he reached there on a bus from Madurai, Tamil Nadu, with a bag containing Rs.59.88 lakh in cash.
Before that, in March 2014, another seizure, Rs.59.16 lakh, was made from two spots in the city and five alleged carriers were arrested. The cash was suspected to have come from Marthandam in Tamil Nadu with the chief operative allegedly based in Kozhikode.
Both cases still remain open-ended. Whether the third too meets the same fate remains to be seen.
(Reporting by Dennis Marcus Mathew)
