Amit Shah says Turkiye deported Navpreet Singh, held as Navab Virk

Union Home Minister Amit Shah said on Saturday that Turkiye has deported Navpreet Singh, and that Indian agencies have put him in custody on drug-trafficking charges.

Shah announced the return on X. He said Singh, 34, took Turkish citizenship under the name Navab Virk and kept moving heroin and methamphetamine from Afghanistan into India. Shah called the deportation a milestone for the agencies that, in his words, ripped apart veil after veil to unmask the identity. Singh was brought back on Saturday and jailed in connection with the cases against him.

The Hindu and The Indian Express both carried the announcement. Express described him as wanted in several narcotics cases and on the run for years. India submitted an extradition request to Turkish authorities in 2023-24, people familiar with the file told the paper. The return on Saturday is a deportation, not the end of a completed extradition trial. That distinction matters in court. A deportation puts him on Indian soil. The charges still have to be proved.

One thread of the investigation runs through a 2021 seizure of 358 kilograms of heroin. A man named Prabhdeep, posted with a paramilitary force when his name entered that inquiry, has been absconding since 2023. Express linked that file to the wider network in which Singh is accused. The home ministry has not, in the Saturday statement, published a charge sheet or a weight of drugs tied directly to Singh's own hand. The public allegation from Shah is trafficking of heroin and methamphetamine on the Afghanistan-India route, carried on after the Turkish papers were issued.

Turkish citizenship under a second name is the fact agencies say took the longest to break. A fugitive with a new passport can book flights, open accounts and sit outside the reach of a Red Notice that still carries the old name. Shah's account is that Indian agencies matched the two identities and then persuaded Ankara to send him back. Turkiye has not issued its own statement in the reports carried in Delhi. The Indian side has not said whether the deportation followed a court order in Turkiye or an administrative removal.

The route itself is familiar to the Narcotics Control Bureau and to state police special cells. Heroin from Afghanistan has for years moved through Iran and the Gulf, and methamphetamine from the same region has turned up in Indian seizures alongside it. A man who can live in Turkiye under another name is useful to that trade because the paperwork no longer matches the warrant. Saturday's arrest removes that particular cover. It does not close the corridor.

Singh is now in an Indian jail. The cases cited by Shah include drug trafficking and other crimes. The home minister did not list the sections or the courts. Defence counsel, once appointed, will be able to test whether the Turkish identity evidence was lawfully obtained and whether the 2021 heroin file can be tied to this defendant. The political claim is already on the record: a fugitive who bought a second nationality has been returned.

For other warrants sitting with Gulf and Turkish authorities, the precedent is practical. India asked in 2023-24 and got a body back in October 2026, under the name the fugitive was using rather than the name on the original notice. Agencies that still file requests under a single alias will read Singh's return as a reason to send the second name as well.