Heroin ‘extracted’ from Lankan drug mules

A brief ‘vacation’ — less than 12 hours long — in India landed two Sri Lankan nationals in the customs’ net here on Tuesday. The duo, who posed as tourists, later turned out to be drug mules, ferrying about 300 gms of first grade heroin stuffed up their rectums.

They were caught when they checked in for their return flight to Colombo early on Tuesday.

Bearing tourist visas, Mubeen Abdul Hameed (35) and Mohammed Thabseer Abul Hasan (32) from Kandy arrived in Chennai at 3 pm on Monday, airport sources said. However, they reported at the international terminal again at 1 am on Tuesday to board a Sri Lankan Airways flight to Colombo, scheduled to depart at 3.30 am. “The customs officers noticed that they had entered the country only a few hours before and were leaving in a hurry,” said the source. However, their luggage revealed nothing.

Drug smugglers have been known to use body packing as an effective method of couriering drugs.

In most cases, the drugs were sealed in tight pellets and wrapped in a scan-abrasive substance, before being manually pushed into the rectal cavity. Once the mules arrived safely, these pellets were excreted and the drugs extracted. Convinced that they were drug mules, the sleuths subjected the duo to a whole body scan and found that while their stomachs were empty, their rectal passage seemed ‘dark’.

During a medical extraction process that followed, four packets of heroin wrapped in black carbon paper — to avoid scanners — were removed from their bodies. The men then admitted to being drug mules and claimed that they were doing the run for a paltry Rs 5,000 each.