Mundra Port drug seizure | Big haul, small fish and a dead end

In September, 3,000 kg of drugs were seized at Mundra Port in Gujarat and tracked to Aashi Trading Company, which is registered at an address in a middle-class locality in Vijayawada. Appaji Reddem reports on the ongoing investigation of one of the biggest drug hauls of the country

An A4 sheet with two lines printed on it made front-page headlines recently. It simply read: ‘Aashi Trading Company, GSTIN: 37AOTPG6030RIZ7’. The paper was pasted with brown duct tape on the wall of a 60-year-old building located in the densely populated locality of Satyanarayanapuram in Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh. It could be easily overlooked: it is not particularly eye-catching. But it is important, for this is the address of the Aashi Trading Company which was found to be the intended recipient of the nearly 3,000 kg of heroin seized at Mundra port in Gujarat in September, in one of the biggest drug hauls that India has ever seen.

It all began on September 15 when, thanks to a tip-off, the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) . The port is run by Adani Ports and SEZ (APSEZ), the ports business under the Gautam Adani-run conglomerate. The consignment was declared as ‘semi-processed talc stones’ from Afghanistan. On opening it, the officials found that it was, in fact, heroin. It had been exported in the garb of talcum powder from Hassan Hussain Limited in Kandahar and shipped from Bandar Abbas Port in Iran to Mundra Port. It was headed to Delhi, according to the police. Since investigations began, 10 people — six Afghan nationals, one Uzbek national and three Indian nationals — have been arrested. But what came as the biggest surprise during the investigation was that this consignment was being imported by a company in Vijayawada run by . The residents of Satyanarayanapuram are dismayed to find their locality in the news for all the wrong reasons.