Packers and movers transported ganja from Odisha to Nagpur in bank manager’s household goods | Nagpur News

NAGPUR: The ongoing investigation into the seizure of 108kg marijuana, or ganja, worth Rs27 lakh last week led to a shocking revelation. A packers-and-movers transporter, Avinash Dhoke (34), had brought the narcotics consignment concealed in the household goods of an innocent bank manager, who had been transferred from Odisha to Nagpur.The narcotics consignment, intercepted by Kalamna police after a dramatic chase on June 3, has hit the bank manager’s shifting plan, as his household goods have been impounded as evidence. However, the cops have promised to legally sort out the issue as far as possible.The case resurfaced on Saturday after a Kalamna police team, led by senior inspector Praveen Kale under Zonal DCP Niketan Kadam, travelled almost 700km from Nagpur to a remote Odisha village to nab the key supplier, Bulbul Pradhan, alias ‘WhatsApp Bhai’, after waiting in a trap for more than 24 hours. Pradhan belongs to a family of notorious drug mafia. His elder brother is part of an interstate racket with a nationwide network. The mission to bust the drug cartel was undertaken under Nagpur CP Ravinder Singal’s flagship crackdown on narcotics ‘Operation Thunder’, which has unearthed a new nationwide modus operandi of using movers and packers to transport narcotics across India.Sources said that Dhoke was supposed to deliver the bank manager’s belongings to the official’s new address in Nagpur. Dhoke’s driver took a detour of almost 250km to pick up the consignment of 108kg ganja from Pradhan, who was waiting at a location on the Sambalpur highway. The driver had been promised Rs1,000 per kg ganja or Rs1 lakh as his share in profits.Dhoke, who was supposed to deliver the consignment of ganja to Palash Wankhede, managed to keep the tightly packed, dried marijuana herbs in a few sacks under the bank manager’s household belongings, furniture, beds, electronic gadgets, and so on. Wankhede is now behind bars along with Dhoke.Kale said that Dhoke managed to dodge numerous checkpoints, nakabandis, toll nakas, RTO check posts, and highway police by furnishing the receipt of the payment made by the innocent bank manager for shifting his belongings from the Odisha-West Bengal border to an interior village of Odisha, and then to Nagpur in Maharashtra via Raipur in Chhattisgarh.“It is a shocking modus operandi that packers and movers are transporting narcotics with the belongings of their innocent clients. The Kalamna police team, led by sub-inspector Santosh Kumar Ramlod, could identify, chase, and intercept the vehicle because we had specific input and did not stop even after seeing household belongings in it. We offloaded every luggage to search the vehicle before managing to lay our hands on it,” said Kale.Sources from Kalamna police said Dhoke was working for Wankhede for quite some time but has refused to reveal further details during interrogation. The cops are now engaged in gathering technical and electronic evidence for further backward and forward linkages.