10, including wholesalers, nabbed for running fake medicines racket: Delhi Police

Delhi Police bust inter-state gang selling spurious medicines, arrest 10 including manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers; seized thousands of tablets.

The Delhi Police on Thursday said they have busted an inter-state gang involved in selling spurious medicines used by patients of diabetes, migraine and other ailments, adding that 10 people have been arrested in connection with the case.

According to police, Chauhan and Malik were the kingpins of a gang that manufactured fake medicines and sent them to wholesalers and retailers through courier. (Representational image)

Senior police officers said those arrested include manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, and pharmacists.

Additional commissioner of police (crime) Sanjay Bhatia said the accused were identified as Vikas Chauhan, 36, Surender Malik, 40, Parvez Khan,33, Upkar Singh alias Mani, 33, Jasdeep Singh, 23, Abdul Basit, 21, Daniyal Ali, 25, Mukesh Kumar, 42, Anil Kumar, 23, and Chander Pal Singh, 70. They were arrested in different raids across Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Haryana.

According to police, Chauhan and Malik were the kingpins of a gang that manufactured fake medicines and sent them to wholesalers and retailers through courier. “The forensic department will verify if the medicines contained harmful compounds which had an adverse impact on human health,” Bhatia said, adding that hundreds of thousands of tablets that they suspect are spurious were seized from a store in east Delhi’s Geeta Colony and a courier company in Panipat.

The additional commissioner said that the action against the racketeers came on a tip off that fake medicines were being supplied by Upkar and Mukesh to different stores in Delhi-NCR. An initial probe indicated the involvement of several people in the racket, Bhatia said.

“A team was constituted and divided into three parts to conduct simultaneous raids at different places. An inspector along with medical representative of two major pharmaceutical companies intercepted a vehicle under Tilak Bridge in central Delhi and arrested two people, later identified as Upkar and Jasdeep. A total of 44,530 tablets including fake Ultracet, Amaryl 1M , Gluconorm, Defcort were recovered from the vehicle,” Bhatia said. He added that the two suspects told the police that they procured the medicines from Abdul Basit of Geeta Colony and Vikas Chauhan of Mandoli.

A second team apprehended Mukesh Chand from Uttam Nagar and recovered 730 tablets of different medicines from him, and a third team nabbed Abdul Basit and Daniyal Ali from east Delhi, recovering 57,000 tablets from them, Bhatia said.

Explaining the modus operandi, Bhatia said the suspects told police during interrogation that the fake Ultracet tablets were being manufactured in a factory in Himachal Pradesh’s Mandi by Anil Kumar, who is an employee of Surender Malik. Police said that Parvez used to collect the spurious medicines from the courier company and sold them to Daniyal, who in turn sold these spurious medicines to Basit, a pharmacist in Geeta colony.

Upkar revealed that he also used to get fake medicines from Vikas Chauhan, who manufactured the drugs at his factory in Rajender Nagar Industrial area in Ghaziabad

At the instance of the accused, a raid was conducted at the office of the courier company in Panipat and over 200,000 tablets along with packing material were recovered.