In a special drive, the Kochi City police conducted raids across 10 prominent courier firms in the city.
District Police Chief (Kochi City) S. Syamsundar ordered the drive in the wake of the reported rising drug smuggling through courier firms. The raids were carried out jointly by the city special squad and the central sub division police stations. Mr. Syamsundar said that similar raids would be conducted in the coming days as well to check potential drug smuggling.
In January, the Kochi zonal unit of the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) had seized over 350 LSD blots smuggled in as a postal parcel here and arrested eight persons who were suspected to be part of a Darknet-based drug racket. The enforcement agencies are faced with the challenge of the increased threat posed by technology-driven drug smuggling and couriering drugs from abroad.
In the instant case, the NCB found Telegram Messenger, a cloud-based, cross-platform instant messaging service, and cryptocurrency to be major tools at the hands of the accused in getting drug delivered from Germany as a postal parcel. They reportedly followed links shared over Telegram leading them to the Darknet where the order was placed, while payments were made through cryptocurrency wallets.
The incident has also alerted the Excise department, which is not new to the modus operandi of drugs being smuggled from abroad as parcels. In 2022 alone, the department intercepted five such parcels hardly in as many months at the International Mail Centre (IMC) of the Postal department and postal appraisal office of the Customs department.
The parcels were from as diverse destinations as Poland, the United States, Netherlands, and Qatar. Among the seized drugs were 262 LSD blots, 222 grams of MDMA, and 9.88 grams of cocaine packed into numerous parcels.
