A senior police officer who headed the anti-narcotics wing of Lahore police is being accused of being involved in cross-border drug smuggling via drones. The Lahore Deputy Inspector General Imran Kishwar said a Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) was involved and a case has been registered against him by the Anti Narcotics Force (ANF).
Cops said the drones would drop off drug bundles at a given location in India’s Punjab state and then return and smugglers on both sides of the border would connect with each other and arrange the drop. The payments for the drugs would be made in the UAE, the Dawn said in its report.
It also emerged that a frontman was working for the cop and the business was going for several years.
“We have constituted a high-powered committee of senior police officers to further expand the scope of the investigation into the illegal cross-border smuggling of the drug,” the DIG was quoted as saying by the Dawn.
The issue first came to light in July when a drone carrying six kilos of drugs, worth millions, crashed outside Lahore. Around the same time Malik Mohd Ahmad Khan, a top Pakistan government official, told news channels in Pakistan that smugglers in Pakistan are using drones and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to smuggle drugs across the border into India from the border town of Kasur.
The smugglers were transferring methamphetamine from Lahore to India.
Probe revealed that senior police officer Mazhar Iqbal was involved in the alleged smuggling. He has secured an interim bail after a case was registered against him.
Iqbal arrested a smuggler and recovered 35 kilos of heroin from him but he allegedly let the man off the hook after taking a PKR 75 million bribe (Rs 2,05,18,043). He also recovered three vehicles.
However, in the official report Iqbal wrote he recovered merely 450 grams of heroin from the smuggler who ran his operations from the Cantt area.
Later the ANF carried out another raid where the smuggler and a frontman for the DSP were nabbed in connection with cross-border smuggling.
The frontman, now a prime suspect, claims he was ““privately working for the DSP in the cross-border smuggling of meth and added that the business had been going on for the past several years”.