Police arrested Dhanesh S Nair, 31, known as Danny or Danny Bhai, the alleged main accused of a network that smuggled MDMA from Bengaluru into Kerala, at Angamaly in Ernakulam district.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7] Police gave his home as Parayil house in Vayyapuram village, near Harippad.[8][3] A special investigation team led by Aluva Deputy Superintendent of Police Baiju Paulos, with the inspectors of the Angamaly and Nedumbassery stations, caught him after seeing him loitering near the Angamaly railway gate.[1][9][2][4][10] Officers seized 803 grams of hashish oil from him, the only cannabis product counted here, and eight grams of MDMA.[1][9][8][2][4][5][6][7] Police said Dhanesh had close links with Nigerian drug syndicates.[7]

The banana trade

Police said Dhanesh used his banana plantation and farmland at Nanjangudu near Mysuru as cover for the trafficking[1][9][8][4][6] Police said he had been buying intoxicants in Bengaluru and Mysuru and smuggling them into Kerala for the past three years.[7] Police said he hid drugs in vessels in the bird cages at his house.[7]: nendran bunches were trucked daily to markets across Kerala, with drugs hidden inside them.[11][4] He had won awards for his banana farming, including the state’s best young farmer award in 2023, and studied agribusiness in Germany.[5][6] Police said he recruited young people to move and sell the drugs[1], coordinating sales through Instagram and using couriers[9][4], and that videos on his phones showed how the drugs were hidden in the bunches.[1][8][6]

The lead came from the phone of Harikrishnan, arrested a day earlier at a lodge in Aluva with 185 grams of MDMA.[12][9][8][2][4][13] He and Shinu Sebastian, arrested with seven grams of MDMA at Thoppumpady in Kochi, sold the drugs on Dhanesh’s instructions through an Instagram account named Danny Bhai and passed the proceeds to his accounts, police said.[1] The investigation then widened into Tamil Nadu and Karnataka under District Police Chief K S Sudarshan, and the team said it had broken the main supply line from the Bengaluru–Mysuru area[1][5]; it is looking for more members of the gang.[1][4]