7 arrested at Ahmedabad airport for smuggling marijuana worth Rs 2 crore

Seven people, including a woman, were arrested at the Ahmedabad airport for trying to smuggle 1.75 kgs of hybrid marijuana worth Rs 2.11 crore into India, officials said on Tuesday.
Four of the accused had landed in Ahmedabad on a flight from Thailand and the other three had gone to receive the four people and collect the marijuana consignment, police added.
Police had received a tip-off, based on which DCP Zone 4 Dr Kanan Desai and his team conducted the operation with the CISF team at the Ahmedabad airport and arrested the smugglers.
Initial investigation revealed that a girl named Manisha Kharari, a resident of Pethapur in Gandhinagar, was going to collect the marijuana bag from the smugglers returning from Thailand on the instructions of her boyfriend Ashraf Khan alias Sameer Pathan. She was to then hand over the consignment to the main accused.
Although seven people have been arrested, a hunt for the drug kingpin Ashraf Khan is on. An investigation is also underway as to how the drug consignment sneaked through security checks in Thailand.
During questioning, the accused said one Mohammed Kasam would send four people on a trip to Vietnam. Different people would be sent on trips for four to five days. On their way back, they would hide the marijuana in cushions in their bags and smuggle it into India.
Kasam would bear the expenses of their stay and travel to and from Thailand. When they land in India, they would be given Rs 10,000 which contained marijuana.
In return for their stay in Thailand, they only had to smuggle the marijuana into India. Manish’s task was to collect the bag containing the drug consignment from the accused returning to India and put them in a rickshaw.
The job of one of the accused, Sayaz Miana, who drives a rickshaw, was to ferry the bag from the airport. He was also involved in scouting and hiring potential smugglers who could do the smuggling so that they could continue with their illegal business.