Patiala: Further investigations into the Delhi-based multi-crore international synthetic drug racket have revealed the staggering volumes of precursor chemicals and synthetic drugs smuggled by the racketeers which are worth over Rs.2000 crores in the international market. It has also been revealed that the kingpin of the Delhi-based racket Dev Behl was an associate of Dawood Ibrahim and his brother Anees in gold smuggling.

 

Disclosing this here today, Mr. Hardyal Singh Mann, SSP, Patiala said that Dev Behl, the drug racket kingpin was a man in his 50s and started his criminal career in the early 1980s. For five years from 1983 up to 1988, he was operating an international gold smuggling syndicate along with Anees, brother of Dawood Ibrahim on the directions of Dawood Ibrahim himself. Mr. Mann informed that he had met Anees and Dawood many times during the course of the gold smuggling racket. He maintained social contact with Dawood Ibrahim even after their partnership broke-up in 1988. He even went to Dubai for meeting Dawood. This gold smuggling racket was operated on a massive scale with 8-10 kgs of gold being smuggled on a monthly basis, he added.

 

 

The SSP further said that Dev Behl has revealed in his interrogation that due to business differences with Anees and also due to the fact that gold smuggling did not remain as lucrative as before, he quit the gold smuggling and in order to convert his ill-gotten wealth from criminal activities into white money started a sale/purchase business of second-hand cars. He said that it was not long before Dev Behl again ventured into criminal enterprise-according to the preliminary investigations he started operating drug racket in the year 2000. Keeping the standards of smuggling on a big scale as earlier done in the 1980s in the gold smuggling racket, Dev Behl obtained precursor chemicals like ephedrine, pseudoephedrine, ketamine etc. in huge quantities and manufactured synthetic drugs like Ice on a major scale.

 

 

Mr. Mann pointed out that according preliminary estimates, Dev Behl and his associates obtained at least 1500 kgs of precursor chemicals and converted them into synthetic drugs like Ice through the manufacturing process in factories in HP and other places, and, smuggled the synthetic drugs toCanada. Dev Behl generally preferred handling large contraband consignments. In 2004 he obtained 700 kgs of pseudoephedrine fromHyderabad, manufactured Ice from it and pumped the synthetic drug (Ice) in the international market. 

 

 

The SSP said that investigations have revealed that recently Dev Behl was working on one of his largest orders so far- supply of 300 kgs of Ice to be routed through Nairobi, Kenya, Africa- a single contraband consignment that was worth Rs.1500 crores in the international market! However, his luck ran out and he was nabbed by the Punjab Police before the contraband consignment could be prepared fully and delivered.