Mumbai: A Brazilian woman has actually ‘coughed up’ cocaine worth nearly Rs 11 crore after being arrested at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport in Mumbai on Sunday. The woman, travelling to India from Sao Paolo in Brazil, was apprehended by sleuths of the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) soon after she landed.
“We had specific intelligence of such an attempt by a Brazilian national. Based on that information, we stopped the woman and started to interrogate her. Finally, she confessed of swallowing capsules with narcotics inside,” a DRI official said.
The woman was taken to a nearby government hospital where doctors made her ‘cough up’ the capsules. According to the official, there were 100 capsules containing 1,096 grams of high-grade cocaine. The estimated value of the cocaine is nearly Rs 10.96 crore in the illicit market.
The cocaine has been seized and the woman arrested under the Narcotics and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act, 1985. If pronounced guilty, she stands to spend up to 20 years in prison.
“We are investigating the matter. Efforts are on to interrogate her further to find out who she was supposed to meet and supply the cocaine to. There is clearly a large racket involved. A person travelling on a tourist visa to another country, where she knows nobody, does not carry such contraband. We are trying to get to the kingpins,” the official added.
On February 19, another woman – a resident of the Democratic Republic of Congo – was arrested by the DRI at the Mumbai airport with 10 cocaine-filled capsules inside her stomach. She had arrived from Kinshasa. The value of the narcotics seized from her was Rs 5.44 crore.
