So what were the ship's previous ports of call?
Here are more details"obviously some masala content taken by reporter from established sources".
Heroin double-cross on high-seas
It was just another assignment in the Gulf for
26-year-old Suprit Tiwari, a marine engineer and captain in the merchant navy based in Kolkata, when he got a call in
mid-April this year from
Syedali Moniri's firm to join the crew of a ship.
Moniri, an Iranian operating from Dubai with his three brothers, holds sway in the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman with a fleet of ships.
Tiwari reached
Bandar Abbas, an Iranian port on the Strait of Hormuz, early in May and got to know that the ship was
docked for repairs.The merchant vessel, with a capacity to carry 250 tonnes of oil, had been known by many names in its 35 years at sea. For this voyage, perhaps its last due to its deteriorating condition,
it was to be known as Henry' instead of `Prince II'. For lack of time, the name 'HENNRY' (sic) was hand-painted on its side.The ship's papers showed
registration at Panama - something almost all major ports look at suspiciously.
Along with Suprit, seven other Indians -
Mohnish Kumar, Manish Patel, Sanjay Yadav, Divyesh Kumar, Dinesh Kumar, Vinay Yadav, and Anurag Sharma - joined the crew, complete with
two cooks and an Iranian captain. Tiwari had a hunch that they may have be in for diesel smuggling, a thriving practice due to huge price difference between Iran and the Gulf countries. The smugglers get fuel from Iran and sell it for thrice the price on other shores.
With a new engine and other repairs,
Henry set sail from Bandar Abbas in early June. The mood on the ship changed when
two men, identified as 'engineers', boarded the ship 100 nautical miles off the coast in the Gulf of Oman. The men started work on making
cavities in storage tanks, pipes and other parts of the ship. They took care to hide it well. The objective of the voyage was now clear - it was being prepared to smuggle narcotics. The crew felt unease as there have been a few instances of ships being caught for similar activities. The ship soon reached
Al Hamriya port near Dubai, where the crew spent a few days awaiting orders. The
cavity makers then left the ship. When the
orders finally arrived for Suprit and Iranian captain, they were to carry an unspecified cargo from off the Pakistani coast to Sharm El Sheikh port in Egypt.It is suspected that
Suprit met Devender Yadav, a native of Uttar Pradesh who was working in UAE, in this period.
Devender played a pivotal role in connecting Suprit with Vishal Yadav, an oilman working in the UAE since 2011. Agencies indicate that Devender had a history of smuggling narcotics.
Opportunity of a lifetime
Investigating agencies say that in
early July the seeds of a possible double-cross were sown in Suprit's mind. Through Devender, Vishal had told him that he could make more money if he took the ship to India and if he got his hands on the said narcotics.
On July 6, Suprit watched the film 'Hacker', depicting the journey of a youth who makes a lot of money using his skills.
Investigators said that the film convinced Suprit to take a risk, come what may.
The
ship spent the next few days sailing in the Strait and collecting about 150 tonnes of fuel from oil smugglers for the journey ahead from smaller ports such as Khasab and Limah on the Omani coast. The planned journey was a long one but they were certain of refueling on the Gulf coast.
Henry then sailed to the Iranian port of Chabhar and then left for Pakistan.
By July 15, the ship was near Gwadar port in Baluchistan province of Pakistan. Rather than enter the thriving port, their orders were to stay a distance away, closer to the fishing villages nearby.
By nightfall,
three big speedboats came near the ship, anchored about 70 nautical miles away from the port, and started unloading white packets. This continued for
three nights with the stock of highquality heroin reaching 1,500kg.The operation was conducted under the watchful eyes of
Khaled Mohamed and Mustafa, suspected to be agents of Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), who were to remain on the ship till the end of the voyage. At least 500kg more of the narcotics was available, but all the cavities on the ship were full.
After the loading was complete, the
Iranian captain handed over control to Suprit while he and the two cooks left the ship for the port. Now, the command and destiny of the ship were in the hands of Suprit and the Indian crew.
Agencies believe that the pure heroin, with brand names such as Lady Diana, 888 and 999, was made from opium illegally produced in south-east Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan. Labs in Pakistan processed it in cooperation with local
drug lords and the ISI, to turn it into expensive heroin, which is in great demand in Europe, the US and Southeast Asia. The final consignments - in 1kg and 500g bags - would be smuggled to various countries across the globe through sea and land routes. According to rough estimates, the sea routes out of Pakistani ports ferry 8 tonnes of heroin every year. Thus, if everything went to plan, the ship would have carried a sixth of the contraband being shipped out of Pakistan.
Once the details were clear, Suprit got in touch with Vishal, who promised him Rs 50 crore if he brought the consignment to Indian shores. Vishal estimated the value of the stock to be Rs 200 crore.
Moniri had promised Suprit Rs 5 crore for taking the ship to Egypt according to the initial plan. The new offer drastically changed the equation. The new idea was dangerous, as even a whiff of the plan would have got Suprit killed by either the Iranians or the ISI.
1,500kg of danger
On July 24, the ship set sail to wards Oman, en route to Egypt and the pressure began mounting on Suprit to act fast.
In two days, they were out of the Gulf of Oman and in the Indian Ocean, taking the coastal route round the Horn of Africa to the Red Sea. While the details are not clear,
investigating agencies suspect that Khaled and Mustafa were killed and thrown overboard on July 25 or 26 - which was necesary to allow them to make the change of course.
On
July 26, the ship steered
away from charted path and shut down its Automatic Identification System (AIS), which is mandatory for every ship on the open seas, to avert collisions. The
wireless communication was switched off - so no explanation would have to be given on the loss of contact with base and the disappearance of the two ISI men. Suprit started using a
satellite phone to communicate.
He contacted his brother,
Sujit in Kolkata, apprising him of the deal and asked him to handle the financial aspect of it. On the same day, Suprit got news of the birth of his daughter. He was aware of the consequences of things going wrong. With the bumping off of the ISI men and cutting communications, he had severed ties with Moniri and the senders of the contraband in Pakistan. He could now not even go to Egypt as was first planned, because he didn't know the contact there. He thus had no option but to trust Vishal, who he had known only for a few days, and hope that everything went as planned.
He also had to take the crew into confidence. The crew, consisting of natives of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh and West Bengal, had been promised Rs 30,000 each for the trip and signing out - the maritime term for the end of a contract and the return of passports - on completion of a voyage. Suprit offered them Rs 10 lakh each for their support in taking the ship to Indian shores in addition to a share from the drug sale. All decided to join as most had spent one or two years in Gulf countries and Iran doing menial jobs. The money could change their lives forever.
In search of destiny
The
difficulties started as soon as the ship headed to the coast of Gujarat. Suprit realized that with the AIS shut down, he
couldn't automatically chart a course and had to get latitude-longi tude to manually navigate the vessel. The crew also reported that
they didn't have enough fuel to sail the 800 nautical miles to Mumbai. When Suprit told Vishal about this,
Vishal roped in
Irfan Shaikh, who had contacts in Gujarat. At Shaikh's suggestion, Vishal told Suprit to go to
Alang, the ship-breaking yard near Bhavnagar in the Gulf of Cambay.By taking the ship to Alang, the group wanted to kill multiple birds with one stone.
The
ship would be dismantled and no evidence would remain of the act. Moreover, small boats would carry the contraband in small batches, reducing the risk of getting caught. Simultaneously in Mumbai, Vishal and Irfan were looking for buyers for the narcotics, but they apparently had no success. Investigators said that
in a desperate effort, one of the accused even approached the Mumbai office of a national agency on July 25, telling top officials there about 2 tonnes of heroin arriving soon on the Indian coast. The officials couldn't believe this, as the reported volume was unprecedented. If the information turned out to be true, the informant would have got Rs 8 crore as reward. They asked the informants to keep engaging the ship captain and have the vessel brought to Mumbai.
This information was apparently not shared with any other agency or even other zones of the same agency.
The prey arrives
By July 29, the
buzz had got louder and louder about a ship with contraband coming from Pakistan, heading towards Gujarat. As the state's coast had been used earlier for nefarious activities -including the arms landing at Gosabara for the Mumbai blasts of 1993 and the hijacking of the Kuber before the 2611 attacks -the
Indian Coast Guard, Indian Navy, military intelligence, intelligence bureau, Gujarat police's Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS), Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) and others got active. They were
lookin for Prince II, the original name of the ship, and not 'Henry'.The officials even thought that the ship may have gone elsewhere, when two ships on the said route turned out to be on their destined course with proper papers.
However,
after midnight on July 30, Samudra Pavak, a coast guard ship, intercepted the boat and stopped it for checking about 150 nautical miles off the coast of Porbandar.
Aerial surveillance had revealed the ship's presence. When questioned about their destination,
Suprit told them that they were heading to Alang but they had no papers corroborating the claim. A tougher interrogation yielded the truth. Suprit confessed that they were carrying a huge stash of heroin. The ship was searched but the contraband was found from the cavities only with guidance from Suprit and the crew. The volume surprised the officials as such a large stock in a single seizure was unparalleled, for any agency.
Primary details pointed to the involvement of persons from Dongri in Mumbai, which set alarm bells ringing, es pecially for the Gujarat ATS. A team was sent to nab Vishal and Irfan and question them about whether this case involved narco-terrorism links to Pakistan-based Dawood Ibrahim. The most surpris ing aspect for the agencies was the involvement of rook ies - nobody on the ship had any known connections with crime or narcotics smuggling.Tiwari
Aftermath
DRI to Customs to NCB to Gujarat police were all in a rush to take over the investigation, but it eventually came to the
Ahmedabad zonal unit of NCB. NCB so far has arrested 13 persons and are in process of incinerating the seized stock. Other agencies are probing the hawala angle and contacts with drug dealers in Maharashtra, Bihar and West Bengal who were contacted for the haul. Investigators believe
Moniri may be on the run. Due to the quality of the contraband seized, investigators believe it the drugs were meant to go via the Mediterranean to Europe and then onwards to the US, where this amount of the white powder would fetch more than
$1 billion. The retailers would dilute the drug to make bigger profits themselves.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/...n-high-seas/articleshow/60251152.cms?from=mdr
