Two arrested in Delhi for importing drugs from US via dark web

With the arrest of two students from the National Capital, the Delhi Police’s crime branch has busted a drug trafficking syndicate that imported drugs online via dark web from the US and other countries, to distribute them in the city.

The police claimed to have recovered 11.67kg of marijuana, 50 grams of cannabis wax, 50 grams of malana cream and 76 cartridges filled with a costlier type of marijuana worth about ₹2.7 crore from the two men.

The police said the marijuana, marijuana oil and wax that the duo had imported from the US were to be distributed on New Year’s Eve in Delhi-NCR, Chandigarh, Kolkata, Bengaluru and Goa.

Additional commissioner of police (crime) Rajiv Ranjan said the arrest was made a day after Christmas, following a tip-off that two men — Sahil Kadyan (25), an undergraduate student from Inderpuri in Delhi and Ridham (22), a Class 12 student—would come to collect the consignment from a courier company on Rama Road, Moti Nagar, Delhi.

“Our team laid a trap near the courier company’s office and arrested the two men when they arrived in their Honda Jazz car. During search, five cartons were recovered from them, which were imported from the US. We opened the cartons and found toy gift packs inside them. When we opened the gift packs, three packets weighing 470 grams each, full of marijuana, were recovered. A total 7.05kg of marijuana were recovered from them. Further, 50 grams of malana cream were also recovered from Kadyan,” Ranjan said.

The additional commissioner said Kadyan told them he had been into drugs for the past four or five years. “Kadyan said he made the acquaintance of a resident of Model Town who was importing marijuana from the US. He learnt the process of importing ganja from the US and gradually started procuring the drug through the dark web. He paid in advance through bitcoin. He came in contact with one Ando from Berlin, via the dark web, and started procuring marijuana from him. The parcels were sent from California and other US states to India and were delivered by the courier agency after custom clearance,” the officer said.

Ranjan said the dark web is popular among drug traffickers. These websites are accessible only through networks such as Tor (the onion routing project) and I2P (invisible internet project).

He said the complicated system made it almost impossible to reproduce the node path and decrypt the information layer by layer. Due to the high level of encryption, websites are not able to track geo-location and IP of their users, and users are not able to get information about the host, the additional CP said.