When a police officer was nabbed with 200 grammes of heroin in Pathankot’s Shahpur Kandi neighbourhood, he was charged under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act.

The Special Investigation Agency (SIA) has detained two additional people, including a police officer, for allegedly being part of a cross-border narcotics network implicated in terror funding here, officials said on Wednesday. The arrests of Selection grade constable Saif-ud-din of Jammu and former sarpanch Farooq Ahmad Jungal of Uri in north Kashmir’s Baramulla district brought the total number of accused in the case to 17, they claimed.

According to them, the network was discovered by SIA after an inquiry into a hawala case involving Former Minister and Chairman of Nature-Mankind Friendly Party Jatinder Singh alias “Babu Singh.”

Singh was detained in April 2022 after one of his workers, Mohammad Shareef Shah, a resident of south Kashmir’s Kokernag, was apprehended in Jammu with Rs 6.90 lakh in hawala money.

In the current instance, the SIA has already filed a charge sheet against 12 defendants, including the Former Minister. While nine of the accused are being held in Central Prison, three have fled to Pakistan. On January 2, a SIA team raided the house of a police officer in the Belicharana region of here and seized certain electronic gadgets, officials said, adding that additional investigation is underway to dismantle the ecosystem of narcotics supplies used to support anti-national actions.

Officials had stated that the police officer was detained with 200 grammes of heroin in the Shahpur Kandi area of Pathankot and charged under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act. Following the arrest of main accused Mohd Sharief Chechi, also a native of Uri, in September last year, the role of the policeman and the previous sarpanch became public.

After taking over the inquiry, the official stated that SIA discovered the accused’s method of operation, including Chechi, who used to gather narcotics from over the Line of Control to produce earnings for terror funding. “The case was initially registered at Police Station Gandhi Nagar in Jammu following arrest of Shah on specific information that he along with the former minister were working under the directions of Pakistan’s ISI and their agents to fund Jammu-based separatists to carry out subversive activities,” according to police officials.