Custom officials on Monday busted an international drug racket and seized a parcel from Germany containing 2.59 kg of MDMA drugs estimated to be worth ₹1.8 crore ordered through the dark web. The parcel had landed at the Foreign Post Office (FPO) in Bengaluru. A Nigerian national who came to collect the drug parcel was caught.
According to officials , the parcel, carrying large quantities of drugs in the form of pills in different colours of pink, blue and yellow, reached the FPO in Chamarajpet on Saturday after being shipped from an unknown address in Germany.
The customs team on duty at the post office sent the parcel through a scanning machine to spot something amiss about its base area. They opened the parcel to unearth coloured pills pasted to the bottom of the box in an attempt to avoid detection by authorities. A lab test was conducted to ascertain the multi-coloured pills weighing 2.59 kg as Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), a psychoactive recreational drug, which is a banned substance that is notoriously known as Ecstasy pills in drug circles, officials said.
The team then began a probe into the receiver of the drug parcel and reached out to a man in the city in the guise of delivering it. However, getting a whiff of investigators on the drug trial, the suspect, who is a resident of Bengaluru, attempted to flee, but was nabbed in a dramatic chase on the highway by the team. Following an operation that lasted 48 hours, he was placed under arrest under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act, 1985, and produced before a magistrate on Monday, remanded to judicial custody and lodged in the central prison at Parappana Agrahara.
A preliminary probe revealed that the suspect, a Nigerian, had ordered the pills worth ₹1.8 crore in the international market, through the Darkweb and smuggled it through the city’s FPO parcel system, possibly for further distribution in Bengaluru. The customs team is probing his network further.
