BHUBANESWAR: Kebab full plate Rs 200, pakoda half-a-plate Rs 100 and special leg biryani Rs 250 are familiar entries in a hotel’s menu card.
But sleuths of the special crime unit (SCU) in Bhubaneswar could smell something was rather fishy when a man told “pakoda half-a-plate” to a truck driver in Khandagiri and was handed over a small packet in return.
The SCU later realised that those were not names of any dish, rather code words used by notorious drug trafficker Sambhunath Barik (31), who was arrested with brown sugar worth Rs 11 lakh, on Tuesday. The man who received the parcel was Barik.
Barik was wanted in a two-year-old drug trafficking case in which his wife Pinky Das and associate Biswaranjan Roul were arrested by the Saheed Nagar police on July 14, 2021. Police had then seized Rs 34.78 lakh cash from them. Barik had been on the run.
“We took over the investigation recently. Acting on specific information, we remained vigilant in Khandagiri area for the last one week and spotted Barik on Tuesday. We rounded him up when he received a parcel from a truck driver. The packet contained around 110 grams of brown sugar,” SCU’s additional DCP Sanjeev Satpathy said.
According to SCU, Barik had been receiving brown sugar from drug dealers from Digha area of West Bengal. “We came to know that Barik and the drug dealers were communicating in secret codes. Barik used code words like kawa 90, chicken masala 150 and fish 200 to receive his consignments,” Satpathy said. The SCU is planning to take Barik on two-day remand for interrogation after producing him in court on Wednesday.
But sleuths of the special crime unit (SCU) in Bhubaneswar could smell something was rather fishy when a man told “pakoda half-a-plate” to a truck driver in Khandagiri and was handed over a small packet in return.
The SCU later realised that those were not names of any dish, rather code words used by notorious drug trafficker Sambhunath Barik (31), who was arrested with brown sugar worth Rs 11 lakh, on Tuesday. The man who received the parcel was Barik.
Barik was wanted in a two-year-old drug trafficking case in which his wife Pinky Das and associate Biswaranjan Roul were arrested by the Saheed Nagar police on July 14, 2021. Police had then seized Rs 34.78 lakh cash from them. Barik had been on the run.
“We took over the investigation recently. Acting on specific information, we remained vigilant in Khandagiri area for the last one week and spotted Barik on Tuesday. We rounded him up when he received a parcel from a truck driver. The packet contained around 110 grams of brown sugar,” SCU’s additional DCP Sanjeev Satpathy said.
According to SCU, Barik had been receiving brown sugar from drug dealers from Digha area of West Bengal. “We came to know that Barik and the drug dealers were communicating in secret codes. Barik used code words like kawa 90, chicken masala 150 and fish 200 to receive his consignments,” Satpathy said. The SCU is planning to take Barik on two-day remand for interrogation after producing him in court on Wednesday.
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