Agartala: A local court remanded six people, including five residents of Bihar, to three days in jail who were arrested at Agartala railway station on Sunday with 970 bottles of a banned cough syrup used as a cheap narcotic substance in a joint operation of the Railway Protection Force (RPF) and Government Railway Police (GRP).
According to police, railway security personnel conducted a raid on the Rani Kamlapati Express, which connects Tripura with Madhya Pradesh, based on secret information that five youths from Bihar, accompanied by a local resident of the Goyalabasti area (a colony of settlers from Bihar), boarded the train with contraband intended to transport the consignment to West Bengal and Bihar.
After an initial investigation, a case was registered at the local police station under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, and all of them were booked. The accused persons have been produced in a local court seeking remand for further interrogation, and the court sent them to jail, police said.
In another raid on Sunday late at night, GRP and RPF arrested as many as five Bangladeshi nationals enroute to Maharashtra from Agartala railway station and later produced them before the court. The court also sent them to jail. During a regular search on the Kolkata-bound Kanchenjunga Express, security personnel noticed the suspicious movement of six individuals.
During interrogation, five Bangladeshi nationals were found to have crossed over India without valid documents. They were identified as Bellal Hossain, Sohail Miah, Ajijul Hakim, Shami, and Hafijul Islam. The sixth person, identified as Ronny Maksud Khan, hailing from Maharashtra, was facilitating their travel to engage in a garment factory there.