Police have arrested five persons, including Ratan Lal Sanghai of Sanghai Group, with contraband drugs worth over Rs1.32 billion.

A team of police from Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB)  had recently raided Bara-based Arya Pharmalab run by Sanghai Group and confiscated around 500 kilograms of drugs, including Ephedrine/Pseudoephedrine which is used to produce Amphetamine, a controlled prescription drug that has been heavily abused for recreational use in different parts of the world.

Police suspect that Arya Pharmalab had been supplying Pseudoephedrine to illegal drug manufacturers in China, India, Myanmar and Thailand. According to Deputy Inspector General of Police Jaya Bahadur Chand, chief of NCB, they found 471.88 kgs of raw materials from 31 cartoons from Sanghai Plastic Industries inside the Patan Industrial Area.

DIG Chand said Ratan Lal Sanghai, elder brother of Pawan Kumar Sanghai, who is at large, had reportedly directed the arrestees to hide the drugs inside the industry compound. He was planning to smuggle the seized drugs abroad. Meanwhile the five arrestees were made public along with the contraband drugs on Sunday.

Besides Ratan Lal, police also apprehended Mohin Halan, Dilip Pandit, Shyam Tamang and Badir Ban.

Pandit, who hails from Raxaul, India, was arrested from Kamalpokhari in Kathmandu. It was him who had tipped the police about the contraband drugs stashed inside Arya Pharmalab for smuggling purpose. Tamang and Ban were long involved in smuggling of the drugs to China and India.

The Kathmandu District Court has sent the four to a four-day investigative custody. Police said a total of 2,974,000 tablets were seized from the arrestees. Each tablets contained at least 60 mg of Pseudoephedrine.