A day after the Coast Guard seized 1,500 kg of heroin worth Rs 3,500 crore from a merchant ship off the Porbandar coast, preliminary investigations Monday indicated that the captain and crew diverted the Panama-registered vessel “to get back at their employer” and, in the process, “make quick money” since they were “unhappy with the reward they would have received to ship the consignment to Egypt”. Captain Suprit Tiwari (27) of Hennry was said to have told interrogators — these included officers from different security agencies, Gujarat ATS and Porbandar police — that he “had an idea about the contraband but was not offered a good reward”. The case has been handed over to the Narcotics Control Bureau for a detailed probe. On input from National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO), the ship aroused suspicion because a vessel with its description was not expected to anchor at any of the ports in Gujarat. And the crew version that the ship was headed to Alang for breaking was also not true. Sources said Tiwari, from Chhapra in Bihar and settled in Kolkata, told interrogators that the heroin was loaded in Pakistani waters off Gwadar and was to be taken to the Egyptian coast. But Tiwari and seven crew members, sources said, decided to sail to India instead to sell the contraband. Tiwari, sources said, had not been paid his salary by his Iranian employer and came to India with the vessel to sell the heroin to “make quick money”. “Tiwari was in touch with two Mumbai-based persons, Subhash Yadav and Irfan Shaikh, to sell the contraband. Yadav assured him that the consignment would easily fetch Rs 500 crore. A deal was struck and the crew diverted the ship to India. They were using satellite phones and the conversation was picked up by security agencies which alerted the Coast Guard,” sources said. The Gujarat ATS detained Yadav and Shaikh and took them to Ahmedabad. Suprit’s brother Sujit, a B.Tech final-year student in Sodepur in Kolkata, was also picked up from a house in Entally area with the help of the Kolkata STF. Suprit told Sujit, STF sources said, that they would receive Rs 50 crore for a shipment. ATS sources said Sujit was flown to Ahmedabad. Although the vessel was registered in Panama as Hennry, its crew members transmitted its identity as Prince-II. “Vessel Hennry was observed transmitting her identity as Prince-II. During earlier voyages, she was identified as Al Sadiq from a marine traffic website,” a Coast Guard officer said. An intelligence officer said: “The vessel belongs to an Iranian identified as Saiyed Ali Morani. The crew members have told us that they used to sail mid-sea to supply diesel to other ships. But this time, it was used to transport contraband.”
