The unearthing of a drug racket in the State capital, allegedly involving Kannada film actors, and directions from the State police chief seem to have put the police in various districts on alert as more cases related to narcotic substances are being registered and recoveries being made.
While the 1,350 kg haul of marijuana in the northern Karnataka districts, most of it from a “sheep farm” in a remote village in Kalaburagi, was the biggest of them, there have been a series of searches in Belagavi and Hubballi-Dharwad. The police have arrested drug peddlers, users, and some people who were illegally farming the crop. The Belagavi police have also arrested a group that was into the illicit trafficking of narcotic substances between Goa and Karnataka for years. Most of the substance seized is ganja that was either grown locally or was brought from nearby districts.
In Belagavi, the biggest haul has been 120 kg seized from a farm in Suttatti village, near Kudchi. The Khanapur police arrested four persons and seized 100 kg of ganja from them at Jamboti village, where youngsters were trying to transport the prohibited goods from Goa into Belagavi. Another recovery of 18 kg of ganja was made at Mugalkhod village. In a span of one week, the Hubballi-Dharwad police and the Davanagere police have made recoveries of ganja weighing between a few hundred grams to over 5 kg.
Little information
The local police in Kalaburagi district, where the raid on the “sheep farm” was conducted by the Bengaluru police, say they had little information about drug peddlers in the region. “In the last five years, we have had barely 25 drug-related cases. It is true that we have very little information on active drug peddlers. This notwithstanding, we are trying to go deeper into the issue apart from intensifying vigilance,” Kalaburagi City Police Commissioner N. Sateesh Kumar told The Hindu. Superintendent of Police Simi Mariam George said teams have been formed to speed up searches and investigation.
