India, June 24 -- The Enforcement Directorate on Wednesday conducted searches at multiple locations in Delhi as part of a money laundering investigation into the 2021 Mundra port drugs haul case, officials said. Five premises in the national capital are being covered by the central agency, including those of Delhi-based businessman Harpreet Singh Talwar alias Kabir Talwar, a man named Shamshudeen and some others, under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), the ED officials said. Talwar, who runs popular nightclubs in Delhi, was arrested by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) in this case in August 2022 and he recently came out of prison after he was granted bail by the Gujarat High Court. In one of the biggest seizures of drugs in the world, the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence, an enforcement agency under the Union Ministry of Finance like the ED, had seized 2,988.21 kg of Afghan-origin heroin from the Mundra port in the Kutch district of Gujarat in September 2021. The consignment, worth about Rs 21,000 crore in the international illegal drugs market, reached the Indian shore via Iran. The ED had registered the money laundering case in 2021 and the latest searches are being undertaken on the basis of some new inputs, including that the narcotics trafficking funds were allegedly invested in some nightclubs in Delhi. The NIA had said in its chargesheet that the proceeds of sale of this drugs network were used for funding the activities of the Pakistan-based banned terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). The federal anti-terror agency had said that this was a test case of sending a narco consignment (heroin) to India, disguised as legal imports in the form of semi-processed talc stones (a raw material with a wide range of applications).
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Millennium Post.