Breaking Bad: 57 year old Bhopal Resident in MD Drug Bust
The duo was reportedly producing 25 kgs of the drug every day.
Bhopal
Amit Chaturvedi, a 57-year-old resident of Bhopal, and Sanyal Prakash Bane, a 40-year-old ex-convict from Nashik in Maharashtra, are an odd couple reminiscent of a Netflix series.
The two are currently in police custody after their arrest from a factory in suburban Bhopal, where they ran a massive Mephedrone production laboratory with a capacity to manufacture 25 kg of the synthetic drug every day.
Police say that this is the largest Mephedrone production unit they have ever come across. The scale of the operation may be gauged by the fact that, apart from 900 kg of the illicit substance, some 5,000 kg of raw material and ‘precursors’ were also discovered on the premises.
While Bane has a police record and has spent five years in prison on a drug-related charge, little is known about the elderly Chaturvedi, who lives in a low-profile upper middle-class neighborhood in the state capital.
Kotra Sultanabad, where Chaturvedi reportedly stays, is a respectable locality inhabited by teachers, professors, and other educated working professionals. It is a rather unlikely address for someone involved in the drug trade.
When the neighborhood came up some 40 years ago, a large number of teachers and professors from the Regional College built houses here; it is just the kind of place where someone like the bespectacled Chaturvedi would fit in.
Looking at the elderly man, no one would believe that he could be involved in the drug business, as he looks every inch the regular city ‘uncle’ who lives next door. But looks can be deceptive.
Both Chaturvedi and Bane have been remanded to an eight-day police custody, and the court has set October 14 as the next day of hearing.
The duo is likely to make startling revelations about the drug network with which they did business. The scale of their operation suggests that they were dealing with suppliers and vendors matching their production capacity.
Meanwhile, there are unconfirmed reports of a third arrest from the opium-producing Mandsaur district in connection with the drug bust that has left the city shocked.
