India: Drug smugglers trafficking new product Jihadists

Indian forces patrolling the country’s frontier with Pakistan closed in on a group of armed smugglers.

A firefight erupted. When the shooting stopped, two men were dead. Three others were apprehended and their cargo, 33 pounds of heroin, confiscated, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Nearly half of India’s heroin seizures, like this one in June, are made here in Punjab, a northern state that has become a conduit for drugs from the terror-funding opium fields of Afghanistan to markets across Asia, Europe and elsewhere, authorities say. 
Illegal narcotics and their legacy of addiction, disease and social upheaval in Punjab were recently the subject of a controversial movie that set off a debate ahead of upcoming state elections.

But Indian antinarcotics and intelligence officials say the damage goes much further. Overlapping groups of drug traffickers, criminals and Islamist fighters in Pakistan, they say, are ferrying anti-India Muslim extremists, counterfeit currency and weapons across the border. Authorities suspect the sale of heroin also helps finance jihadist attacks.

“Once you’ve figured a way in through the border, it becomes a conveyor belt,” a senior Punjab police official said. “You can push drugs or terrorists or anything else.”

The India-Pakistan border isn’t an easy frontier to carry out illegal activity. Barbed-wire fencing runs along much of the 1,800-mile stretch—the product of decades of rivalry that goes back to India’s partition at the end of British rule—and is patrolled round the clock by heavily armed Indian guards.

Earlier this year, six Pakistani militants breached a major Indian air base close to the Pakistan border in Punjab, killing seven people. Investigators say they are looking into whether they entered India with the help of smugglers—and the possible role of an Indian police officer.

Source: MENA