Mumbai The Anti-Narcotics Cell (ANC) of the Mumbai police on Tuesday arrested the owner of a factory in Ankaleshwar, Gujarat and seized 513 kg of Mephedrone (MD) and other raw material to make drugs, all worth ₹1,026 crore, from the factory premises.
Giriraj Dixit, 54, is the seventh accused in the 705 kilo Mephedrone seizure case in which Pravin Kumar Singh, who allegedly manufactured over a thousand kilos of the party drug in an Ambarnath factory, was arrested earlier this month. Dixit has been remanded to ANC custody till August 21.
ANC officials said Singh, who worked in a pharmaceutical company in Gujarat some years ago, met Dixit and convinced him to manufacture MD in his factory. For at least the past year, Singh visited the Ankleshwar factory and guided employees on how to manufacture the drug, the police said.
The drug bust also led to the seizure of 812 kg of white powder and 397 kg of chemicals — suspected to be used in the production of MD — from Dixit’s factory in Ankaleshwar.
Officials said that Dixit purportedly agreed to provide to manufacture the synthetic stimulant and Singh used to monitor its production in the premises.
“We have learnt that three consignments of MD, each at least 500 kilogrammes, was manufactured in the Ankleshwar factory in past one year and delivered at Singh’s commercial space in Nalasopara,” said deputy commissioner of police Datta Nalawade, ANC.
The factory owner, who holds a post-graduate in chemistry from Agra, ran the Ankleshwar factory along with two partners.
Dixit’s name cropped up during Singh’s interrogation. Singh was arrested on August 3, after the ANC’s Worli unit arrested a peddler from Govandi with 250g of mephedrone which in turn led to the arrest of a supplier from whom the narcotic cell recovered 2.8 kg of contraband drugs. Further investigation revealed the involvement of two distributors in Mumbai’s eastern suburbs, whose arrest led the police to Singh, and his commercial tenement in Nalasopara where he stored the MD. On August 8, the anti-drug agency arrested Kiran Pawar, the manager of Namau Chem, a chemical factory at Ambernath where scheduled drugs for several reputed pharmaceutical companies are manufactured.
A raid at the Ambernath factory led the ANC to seize equipment allegedly used to manufacture industrial quantities of mephedrone as well as some invoices that purportedly forwarded the police’s case that over a thousand kilos of mephedrone was manufactured at this unit.
Singh seems to have been Mumbai’s very own Walter White, the ingenuous protagonist of the fiction series Breaking Bad. A forensic audit of his bank account showed large deposits and other transactions totalling ₹50 crore in the last few months alone.The 52-year-old bought a three-BHK-flat in Dahisar, two shops at Nalasopara, and three plots of land just outside Mumbai in the last few years.
As per their investigation, Singh, who hailed from Jaunpur in Uttar Pradesh, began producing and supplying mephedrone about three years ago just as the pandemic began and the country went into lockdown, leading to spiraling anxiety all around, and a spurt in demand. Singh studied organic chemistry and then got an MBA in finance from Purvanchal University, following which he moved to Mumbai with his wife and worked as a supervisor and manager at multiple chemical units in the city.