By Brij Khandelwal, IANS
Agra : Neighbours of Brij Bhushan Bansal here had no inkling of what was going on in the doctor’s clinic till his arrest in 2005 for running a global illegal Internet pharmacy network along with his Philadelphia-based son. A US court has now sentenced the son to 30 years in prison, while the case against the Agra doctor is still hanging fire.
Akhil Bansal, the son of Brij Bhushan Bansal, created and operated a network that smuggled 11 million prescription pills from India and distributed them to 60,000 Americans. “You distributed poison throughout the country,” the US judge pronouncing the sentence said Friday.
All that Brij Bhushan’s neighbours in upscale Kamla Nagar locality remember is that till his sudden arrest by the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB), post and telegraph and courier company vehicles would arrive every evening to pick up parcels from his palatial house.
Twenty arrests were made in countries as far as Costa Rica and Canada. Investigations revealed trading worth $20 million through Internet websites and other contacts.
An estimated 100,000 Americans were victims of the drug racket that Brij Bhushan ran with effective support of his son in the US and a dozen other relatives and friends.
Brij Bhushan, an ordinary MBBS doctor with his clinic on Moti Lal Nehru Road of Agra, became a multi-millionaire within two years with a huge mansion in Kamla Nagar. A source said within two years Brij Bhushan, the kingpin of the racket, earned close to $8 million through Internet sale of so-called sedatives and mild anti-depressants, a cover for banned drugs.
Akhil Bansal was studying for his MBA degree at Templeton University, US, while helping his father run the racket. He had purchased an expensive flat in Philadelphia, four cars and his offshore bank balance was around $6 million at the time of arrest. Others arrested were Akhil’s fiancé, Brij Bhushan’s daughter, son-in-law and father-in-law in Jaipur, all of whom are in jail.
The Agra-centric drug racket couriered prescription drugs, like amphetamines, narcotics and steroids, to people just anywhere – age, nation no bar.
An Indo-US Operation Cyber Chase eventually tracked down the Bansals after a yearlong hunt.
On April 18, 2005, officials from the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) descended on Akhil’s Henry Avenue apartment in Philadelphia, just as he was planning his escape to Canada. Simultaneously, officials of the NCB closed in on Brij Bhushan’s residence in Agra.
Brij Bhushan, interestingly, had served as a surgeon in an army hospital in Delhi.
His modus operandi was simple. Drugs banned in the US and other western countries were marketed under different names and couriered to their destinations, for which his agents collected hefty considerations.
Pills and tablets were crushed into powder, given different names and couriered by our own posts and telegraph department.
But 30 months since his arrest and a charge-sheet filed by the NCB, which has named 21 witnesses, nothing has moved in the case so far.
Within a month of his arrest in 2005 and registration of the case by the New Agra police station, files relating to his case were found stolen from the court in Diwani on Aug 29 that year.
However, the narcotics bureau was able to reconnect the story and prepare a new set of papers for trial.
The case has been hanging fire for some reason.
The police have not been showing the degree of interest that is required to process such sensitive cases. If the case continues to drag like this, people apprehend that vital pieces of evidence could go missing.
However, officials dealing with the case are confident that there is no way the doctor and his accomplices could wriggle out.