Rohini police seize 7.076 kg of heroin and a Lucknow workshop valued at Rs 50 crore

Delhi Police said on Monday that the Special Staff of Rohini district had broken an interstate heroin supply and manufacturing chain, arrested four people, and recovered 7.076 kilograms of heroin. Officers put the international-market value at about Rs 50 crore. A raid on 4 October at a workshop in Sita Colony, Jankipuram, Lucknow, produced 6.275 kilograms of what police called freshly manufactured heroin, plus the chemicals and the pots used to make it.

The operation did not start on Sunday. Police say it began on 16 September, on a tip about movement in Begumpur. Officers stopped a car in Sector 32, Begumpur, and the arrests and seizures that followed mapped a line between Delhi-NCR and Uttar Pradesh. The Lucknow raid is the manufacturing end of that line. The Delhi seizures are the supply end. Police say the two together, plus the arrest of the man they call the main supplier, are what let them describe a network rather than a single courier.

What was in the Lucknow room

At the Jankipuram workshop, officers arrested a man identified as Bablu and took 6.275 kilograms of heroin they said had just been made. With it they took 2.504 kilograms of sodium, 787 grams of acetic anhydride, a tub, a gas cylinder, a mixer-grinder, utensils, polythene, an electronic weighing machine and a wooden basket. Acetic anhydride is the reagent used to turn morphine into heroin. Its presence, in a room with a cylinder and a mixer, is the detail that separates a stash house from a cook. The sodium figure, as police gave it, is 2.504 kilograms. They did not, in the account carried by The Tribune, specify the compound beyond "sodium."

The 7.076 kilogram total and the 6.275 kilogram Lucknow seizure are not the same pile. Police have described heroin recovered at different stages of the chain, and a workshop seizure on top. A reader adding the two figures will over-count. The Rs 50 crore valuation is attached to the 7.076 kilogram recovery, at international prices, not to a retail Delhi price. Street value in the city would be a different number, and police did not give it.

Four arrests, one named

Four people are in custody. Only Bablu is named in the public account of the Lucknow raid. The others are described as part of the interstate line. Police have not, in Monday's briefing, said which of the four was the courier stopped in Sector 32 on 16 September, or how the tip reached Rohini. An investigation that opens on 16 September and reaches a cook-house on 4 October is a three-week file. The public version is the seizures and the arrests, not the intercepts.

Heroin workshops in Uttar Pradesh have shown up before in Delhi Police files, usually as the processing step between a western Indian or border supply of morphine and a city distribution. This one is in Jankipuram, a residential extension of Lucknow, not an industrial plot. A mixer-grinder and a wooden basket in a colony house is a small plant. The 6.275 kilograms police say they found freshly made is a large output for a room of that description, which is why the international price tag is as large as it is.

What the charge sheet will have to prove

A recovery is not a conviction. The charge sheet will have to link Bablu's room to the car in Begumpur, and the car to the other three arrests, with weights that survive a laboratory report. Acetic anhydride is a controlled chemical. Possession of 787 grams, next to 6.275 kilograms of finished heroin, is the fact the prosecution will lean on. The Rs 50 crore figure is a valuation for the briefing. Courts try grams, not press conversions.

For Rohini, the operational claim is narrower than the headline. A district special staff followed a September tip, crossed a state line, and found a cook-house the day before the briefing. Four people are in custody. The heroin is in two reported quantities that should not be added together. The workshop list, down to the basket and the weighing machine, is the part of the file that will be hardest to argue away.