Gujarat drug bust: DRI quizzing Chennai couple

CHENNAI: A couple from the Chennai suburb of Porur are in the custody on the Directorate O Revenue Intelligence (DRI), which recently intercepted a shipment of 3,000kg of heroin, worth Rs 21,000crore in the international market, at the Mundhra port in Gujarat.
DRI teams from Delhi and Gujarat have whisked Govindaraju Durga Purna Vaishali and her husband Machavaram Sudhakar away from the house they had been staying in for a couple of years at Kolapakkam near Gerugambakkam in Porur.
Official sources said the DRI sleuths don’t believe the couple are the masterminds and want to find out the bigwigs behind the shipment of heroin, which was found at Mundhra in two containers amid 39 bundles of talcum powder.
The containers were shipped from Kandahar in Afghanistan and imported via Iran’s Bandar Abbas port by the couple’s Vijayawadaregistered firm, Aashi Trading Company. Officials said Vaishali has taken GST registration for the firm in August 2020 with the address of her mother, who stays in Satyanarayana Puram, Vijayawada.
The Telangana police said all they know about the case is that the address mentioned in the consignment was Vijayawada The DRI officials have seized mobile phones and a laptops, apart from a few pen drives and an external hard disk from the couple in Porur.
They are in the process of retrieving content from these gadgets to get more information about the people behind the racket.
Though the DRI officials refused to divulge any information about the seizures and inquiry details, sources have confirmed that the couple were questioned for more than a day in Chennai before they were taken to Ahmedabad.
The DRI officials have apprehended four Afghan nationals and an Indian national from Delhi in the past two days. They’ve also seized an additional 20kg heroin and 8kg cocaine.