AUGUST 17, 2006

AGRA

NO RELIEF YET FOR DR BANSAL

ONE YEAR AFTER BUSTING OF INTERNATIONAL DRUG RACKET

AGRA:

JUSTICE still eludes him, 13 months after his international drug racket was busted in Agra by the Narcotics Bureau which has filed a charge sheet and named 21 witnesses.

Dr Braj Bhushan Bansal left his humble clinic to join the highly lucrative world of drug peddling. His modus operandi was simple. Drugs banned in the US and other western countries were marketed under different names and couriered to their destinations, for which his agents collected hefty considerations. Pills and tablets were crushed into powder, given different names and couriered by our own P&T department. Everybody was happy, until one evening a team of narcotics bureau from Delhi swooped on his house, following arrests of Dr Bansal's son and daughter in law in America for drug trafficking. His brother was also held and so were his other relatives in Jaipur. All the family members are now cooling their heels in different jails.

Within a month of his arrest and registration of the case by the New Agra police station, files relating to his case were found stolen from the court in Diwani on August 29, 2005. This was a temporary set back as the Narcotics Bureau was able to reconnect the story and prepare a new set of papers for trial.

The case was to have come up in the last week of July, but for some reasons, the police has not been showing the amount of interest that is required to process such sensitive cases. If the case continues to drag like this, people apprehend vital pieces of evidence could go missing, though officials dealing with this case are confident that there was no way the doctor and his accomplices could wriggle out of the trap. ENDS