Bengaluru: A four-member gang’s attempts to smuggle in 30kg hydroponic ganja worth Rs 10.4 crore failed when CCTV at Kempegowda International Airport caught them cutting off bag tags and effecting a quick swap in a Wednesday midnight drama.As they were leaving the premises, the long arm of the law pulled them back — into custody. All four suspects were remanded in 14-day judicial custody on Thursday.According to customs officials, the group, from Uttar Pradesh, planned a coordinated operation splitting into two groups, taking two different flights from different countries. The first pair — Naman Sharma and Usha — boarded flight from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, around 7.20pm Wednesday and reached Terminal 2 of KIA around 11pm.The second pair — Bharat Chaudhary and Naman’s brother Deepanshu Sharma — boarded flight from Kuala Lumpur around 9.15pm and reached T2 at 10.43pm.Based on their travel history and profiling, the customs officials had received intelligence inputs from National Customs Targeting Centre and Directorate of Revenue Intelligence on Deepanshu and Bharat travelling from Malaysia.“Bharat and Deepanshu came with ganja-filled bags, which were lying on the conveyor belt,” a source told TOI.Picking up their bags from the belt, they swiftly removed the airline tags and placed them back on the conveyor belt. Later, Usha and Naman, coming from Vietnam, were to pick up those now-tagless bags and safely carry them out of the customs area without a whiff of suspicion.What the quartet didn’t realise was that CCTV cameras at the terminal were tracking every nanosecond of their surreptitious activities. An inspection of the bags confirmed the group was shipping ganja.“Some traffickers, to avoid getting captured, use fresh faces with no profiling or past. The newly hired conduits’ only job is to pick up the bag and clear the customs,” a senior official said.The four flyers were apprehended under NDPS Act, 1985. They were later produced before the Devanahalli judicial magistrate on Thursday.
