By Tenzin Dharpo
DHARAMSHALA, Dec. 3: Police on Tuesday nabbed a gang of seven smugglers including two Tibetans with an illegal consignment of red sandal wood on National Highway- 4 in Kadapa District in the state of Andhra Pradesh.
A special unit of Red Sanders Anti-Smuggling Task Force (RSASTF) and the Kadapa police intercepted the four members of the gang with logs of red sanders worth 15 lakh, 10,000 INR, several lakh in foreign currencies (US, Vietnam, Malaysia and China), cell phones and a SUV.
The four arrested at Dowlathapuram Cross in Kadapa district are Zhang Xi (34) and Su Lei (27) of Hunan province in China, Passang Tsering (37) and Sonam Tsering (27) from Tibet. The remaining members of the gang operating from Delhi, Manish Pal Luthra (31) from New Delhi, Raghunath Dhangar (32) and Mukesh Das Biragi (31) of Ratlam District, Madhya Pradesh have also been arrested.
Mr. Rahul Dev Sharma, the officer who led the search team told the media that the operation was conducted on the direction of the RSASTF chief and DIG Mr. M. Kantha Rao.
Zhang Xi believed to be the ring leader has admitted that he has smuggled close to 38 tons of sandal wood logs in eight months to China, selling a ton for 1 crore INR there at four times the price he procured it in India. He had come to India five times in the past and has developed a network with other smugglers.
The team concealed the logs with coconut fibre while transporting it via Delhi, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Nepal and Tibet and eventually crossing into China through land routes, sea via Kolkata port and even air routes.
The sandal wood smuggling routes from India, particularly from the southern states employ apart from land routes, sea routes in the Bay of Bengal to port consignments to Myanmar and up north towards other south Asian countries like China where the demand of the commodity is steadily high over the years. Unconventional land routes like Bhutan have also been used since 2013 where the kingdom nation made their first arrest related to the smuggling of the prized wood.
Uses for the sandal wood in line with popular notion are as ingredients in alternative medicine and for furniture. But studies that have pointed to the availability of radioactive elements like Thorium and Uranium in the red sander wood and theories that sandal wood is used to make ‘heavy water’ utilized as coolants in nuclear reactors may have been possible factors influencing such soaring demand.
