The Forest Department is taking efforts to trace the origin of around one tonne of sandalwood which was seized by the police while being smuggled from Kerala to Tamil Nadu via Coimbatore last week.
While the Tamil Nadu Forest Department is expanding its investigation to Kerala, as the whopping 1,051 kg consignment reportedly came from Malappuram district, the Kerala Forest Department has also launched a parallel investigation to find out the trails of the biggest sandalwood smuggling in recent times.
An official said that a special squad of the Kerala Forest Department visited Coimbatore and collected details of the case registered by the Madukkarai forest range of the Coimbatore Forest Division. The Kerala team interacted with Assistant Conservator of Forests M. Senthil Kumar and other officials, who are part of the investigation.
The consignment was found hidden in a secret compartment of a truck which was driven by T.K. Manojkumar of Pathanamthitta district in Kerala. After the driver did not stop the truck at a check-post in Coimbatore on the Salem – Kochi highway in the early hours of July 31, the police followed the vehicle and intercepted it at Attur, near Salem. The truck bearing Karnataka registration number was laden with briquettes.
During investigation, the driver told forest officials that he was tasked to deliver the consignment at Chengalpattu from where another person was supposed to collect it. The officials are in the efforts to trace the person, who tasked the driver to smuggle the sandalwood to Tamil Nadu.
The seized sandalwood logs, many of them believed to be of trees felled recently, will be shifted to the government sandalwood depot at Sathyamangalam in Erode district soon.
