Cocaine cartel members rented car to get to West Delhi — didn’t know it had GPS. Cops followed the trail

All police had to do was visit the Ghazabiad storage facility, look at its CCTV in which they saw the car, trace the said car to a transporter, and follow the car’s GPS route.

This led cops straight to the West Delhi shop in Ramesh Nagar, where they recovered 208 kg of cocaine worth over Rs 2,000 crore.

Seven people have been arrested so far in connection with the racket so far — Tushar Goel, Auranzeb Siddiqui, Himanshu Kumar, Bharat Jain, Jassi aka Jitendar, A. Safi and Md. Akhlaq. The mastermind, Dubai-based Virendra Baisoya, is yet to be nabbed; a lookout notice has been issued against him, said police.

How did police find the godown?

It was while questioning Safi, from Tamil Nadu, that police found out he had brought the consignment to Hapur. From there, Safi and Akhlaq allegedly took it to the Ghaziabad storage facility. When police went to the facility, they found it was leased by an MBA graduate who thought she was working for a pharma company, police sources said.

“She revealed there were four people who loaded different parts of the consignment from the godown in Ghaziabad. Two were Jassi and Goel. The other two were Savinder Singh, a UK resident, and Safi,” a police officer said on condition of anonymity.

Police then checked the facility’s CCTV footage and confirmed Savinder and Safi’s presence, officers added. They spotted the Ertiga car on footage and traced it to a transporter. “Akhlaq rented the car from the transporter. The same car was used to get the drugs to Ramesh Nagar. It had a GPS (tracker), which the accused were unaware of. That’s how the car was tracked,” a police officer said.

The officer further said multiple people involved in the storage and movement of the consignment from South India to Delhi were under the guise that it was a ‘medicine’ consignment of a pharma company. “They were paid monthly salaries through mule accounts. We are working on tracking all the unaware ‘employees’ of the cartel,” the officer said.

The total consignment of 770 kg recovered by Special Cell sleuths, led by DCP (Trans Yamuna Range/Southern Range) Amit Kaushik, was transported in two tranches of 562 kg and 208 kg. The whole lot was stored in the Ghaziabad facility before it entered Delhi, police officers said.

Police said the first batch was busted on October 1 in a godown in Mahipalpur where 562 kg cocaine was seized and four people were arrested, including Goyal, the Delhi distributor and Baisoya’s long-time friend. Goyal was being tracked since August by the Special Cell, said police.

On October 3, Jassi, a UK resident allegedly assigned by Baisoya to ensure storage of the drug, was arrested from Amritsar airport while trying to flee. Singh has fled to London, said police.