What were they cooking in this house? None in this village of 4k had any idea

NOIDA: Prince Gautam would always get a foul smell while crossing the three-storey house in Jaitpur-Vaspur village. He always thought the occupants were cooking "some kind of meat".
Jay Sharma would see that lights in the house were always on even after midnight. He would think that since the building housed African nationals, their sleep timings were different.
Just 500 metres from the Depot metro station in Greater Noida, none of the 4,000-odd villagers had any idea that meth in its "purest form" was being cooked in the house. On Wednesday morning, seven foreigners were arrested with 46kg of MDMA, expected to be worth Rs 200 crore in the international market, and ingredients to produce another 100kg of the drug.
What made the house stand apart is that it did not have any building on 100 metres of either side.
Sharma, a villager, said he would see the occupants move around in a black Honda City.
"They only interacted among themselves, never with us. It's only during the night that the house would buzz to life. They had covered the windows with mesh and the curtains were always drawn," he told TOI.
Gautam, another villager, chipped in. "There was always a foul smell coming from the house. We thought they might be cooking some kind of meat. We had never imagined that they ran a full-fledged lab to produce drugs inside the house," he said.
Sharma said the villagers preferred foreigners as tenants because they paid almost three times the prevalent rent amount.
"Say, for a house that should not cost more than Rs 15,000 a month, foreigners are charged Rs 50,000. Their only condition is that there should not be any interference," he added.
Deputy commissioner Saad Miya Khan said the accused paid Rs 44,000 a month and stayed in the house for a year.
"The ground floor was locked and they stayed on the first floor. They had set up the entire lab on the second floor," he added.
How did they produce the meth? "They would cook ephedrine on a burner and extract the meth from a solution of acetone, ethanol or methanil. After the extraction, the meth was frozen in a solution of methanol/acetone. They produced the purest form of meth," the DCP said.
The waste materials would be dumped in drains, which, probably, led to the foul smell.