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| Saji’s links go deep | | |
ET DESK
Jammu, Jan. 28: Maharashtra anti-terror sleuths suspect that the heroin seized from IPS officer Saji Mohan, picked up from a Mumbai address last week, could have been sourced from Pakistan through a drug dealer in Jammu and Kashmir.
Parambir Singh, additional commissioner of the Maharashtra ATS which is probing the case, said the arrested officer of the Jammu and Kashmir cadre was giving “different versions” to his interrogators.
“But the markings found on the heroin (packets) indicate that they came from Pakistan between August 2007 and December 2008.”
Mohan’s colleagues at the Enforcement Directorate unit in Kochi, Kerala, where he had joined recently, however, said the officer, whom they found quite professional, might have been framed.
Mohan, 41, who was earlier posted as zonal director of the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) in Chandigarh and known for record seizures, was arrested from Classic Club in Mumbai’s Oshiwara on Saturday with 12kg of heroin. Police sources said he had come to the city to collect money for an earlier deal.
The anti-terrorism squad had laid the trap following information from Haryana police constable Rajesh Kumar and Vicky Oberoi, who were arrested with 1.85kg heroin on January 17 after a tip-off.
Based on their interrogation, an ATS team had also raided a flat in Thane and seized another 25kg of heroin. The flat belongs to Oberoi’s son Gaurav, who has been detained.
Sources said investigations had shown that Mohan transported the heroin to Mumbai in October and had stored it in the flat.
Police sources said Mohan, during his two-year stint with the NCB in Chandigarh, had seized 52kg of heroin in a single year.
The ATS has so far seized from Mohan and his associates 38.8kg of heroin, worth 39 crore in the international market. A laptop, a cellphone and CDs seized from Mohan have been sent for forensic tests.
In Kochi, Mohan’s colleagues at the Enforcement Directorate said there was a possibility he had been framed as he might have zeroed in on sensitive cases involving powerful people.
Others said there was another possibility that couldn’t be rejected outright. Investigations in narcotics cases, they claimed, had taken a beating because of the tiny incentive for the informer and the officer concerned.
If the haul, for instance, is over 90 per cent pure, the informer gets Rs 20,000 for every kilogram seized and the officer Rs 10,000. But most often the purity may not be more than 90 per cent, which means lesser amounts as reward.
Sources said some officers keep informers in good humour by offering them a part of the contraband, while informers often asked officers to pass it on to the market because of the risks involved in trading directly.
This practice, the sources said, could suck well-meaning officers into corruption.
But in the case of Mohan, said a customs officer, it looked like a frame-up as no officer with some experience would carry with him 12kg of heroin.
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