In the third such incident in a little over three months, excise officials made yet another major seizure of drugs attempted to be smuggled in through the postal department’s International Mail Centre (IMC) here on Monday.
This time, 207 gm of MDMA and 60 LSD stamps were found packed into 15 different parcels from the Netherlands.
All parcels from abroad are routed through the IMC, run by the postal department, with the help of Customs officials. The parcels are screened by Customs officials, and duty is levied where warranted before being dispatched to the post offices concerned.
Interestingly, the parcels were meant for two persons who already remain jailed after being found to be the intended recipients of drugs smuggled in through IMC on previous occasions. Jasim of Kodungalloor and Fazalu Rahman of Kozhikode currently remain in judicial custody. Excise will register fresh cases against them.
While Fazalu was arrested during the first seizure in March, Jasim was arrested in a similar case a fortnight ago. Out of the parcels smuggled in this time, 10 parcels were addressed to Jasim and five were in the name of Fazalu.
Customs officials manning the IMC turned suspicious about the 15 parcels, and it strengthened on finding names of the previous accused following which they alerted the excise officials.
The Ernakulam Excise special squad led by circle inspector Sajeev Kumar made the seizure. Excise is now set to move the court seeking permission to record fresh arrests of both the accused in the new cases. Their custody will also be sought.
Like in the previous occasions, the orders were suspected to be placed via the Dark Net and paid for using cryptocurrency.
Excise suspect the accused to be active peddlers of synthetic drugs. Probably, they ordered for the drugs before they were arrested in the previous cases and the delivery got delayed, excise sources said.
The contraband will be produced in court and samples have been dispatched for testing at the regional chemical laboratory in Kakkanad.
In the first seizure from IMC, 31 LSD stamps were seized from two separate parcels from the Netherlands and Qatar. In the second incident, 9881.9 mg cocaine and 2896.8 mg MDMA were seized from parcels from the Netherlands.
