SHIMLA, JULY 18: The arrest of an alleged drug supplier from Mohali on Friday has opened another window into the sprawling inter-state chitta trafficking network feeding Himachal Pradesh, even as investigators continue to grapple with the biggest unanswered question — where is the synthetic drug actually originating from?
The Special Task Force (STF) of Himachal Pradesh Police arrested Amit Mahev from Mohali after weeks of technical surveillance, digital tracking and human intelligence. Mahev had allegedly been evading arrest by frequently changing his hideouts and keeping his mobile phone switched off.
Police said Mahev supplied nearly 64 grams of chitta seized by Kotkhai police from a vehicle intercepted at Hulli on July 3. Three alleged peddlers — Rakshit Chauhan, Rahul Sharma and Lovely Sharma — were arrested following the seizure. Analysis of mobile phones, call detail records and other digital evidence led investigators to Mahev, who allegedly supplied the narcotics to Rahul Sharma.
The latest arrest is the second major breakthrough in less than a week in Shimla district's widening investigation into organised narcotics trafficking.
Just days earlier, the STF had arrested Vasu alias Harsh Singhania from Chandigarh in connection with a March 15 seizure of nine grams of chitta from Rohru. The investigation had first led police to Uttar Pradesh, where Amit Gupta was arrested, before the trail extended to Rajasthan's Churu district and finally to Chandigarh.
Investigators reconstructed the supply chain through WhatsApp chats, call records, bank accounts and UPI transactions. They found that Rs 18,000 had been deposited into Vasu's account as payment for the nine-gram consignment seized in Rohru. Police also discovered that around Rs 3.5 lakh had been transferred into his account by co-accused Amit Gupta, while more than Rs 14 lakh had been credited over the last six months despite no identifiable legal source of income.
The investigations indicate that Himachal's apple belt is increasingly becoming a lucrative market for organised drug syndicates, with young people both consuming and allegedly distributing synthetic narcotics. The arrests suggest that traffickers are operating through layered networks spread across multiple states rather than isolated local modules.
Police say their focus has shifted beyond recovering narcotics to dismantling the financial and logistical backbone of organised drug syndicates. This year alone, backward-linkage investigations have led to the arrest of 58 alleged kingpins and the dismantling of 48 inter-state drug networks.
Yet the expanding investigation has also highlighted the scale of the challenge. While police have successfully identified suppliers in Punjab, Chandigarh, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, the primary manufacturing and wholesale source of chitta entering Himachal remains unidentified. Each arrest has exposed another link in the chain, but the network's origin continues to remain beyond the reach of investigators.
With addiction steadily spreading across the state's apple-growing regions, investigators now face mounting pressure not only to arrest couriers and suppliers but also to uncover the larger criminal syndicates producing and routing synthetic drugs into Himachal Pradesh.
