Special Task Force officers arrested two men after stopping a truck in forest in the Jaithari police station area of Anuppur district.[1] The men were Ankit Vishwakarma, of Sidhi, and Dhananjay Singh Patel, of Satna.[1] Both said they were returning empty-handed from Jharkhand because they had not got any freight.[1]

Officers recovered 599 kilograms of ganja, the local word for cannabis, which the STF valued at about Rs 1.8 crore.[1] A Jabalpur team led by DSP Santosh Tiwari tracked the truck from forest near Bilaspur in Chhattisgarh and followed it for nearly 152 kilometres.[1] The truck under watch bore registration JH 02 BL 7103.[1] In the Jaithari area the officers blocked the road with a JCB machine and intercepted the truck.[2] Police told the Free Press Journal that the chase lasted 14 hours, ended in the jungles of Anuppur on Thursday, and yielded 600 kilograms of ganja.[3]

On Wednesday at about 11 am, STF SP Rajesh Singh Bhadoria was told that a truck was carrying marijuana from Odisha to Madhya Pradesh through Chhattisgarh.[1] STF DG Pankaj Srivastava ordered two teams and a tighter watch along the Madhya Pradesh–Chhattisgarh border.[1] The truck looked empty from the rear, an appearance the officers treated as a ruse.[1] The men said a body maker had built a secret cabin of iron sheets, about two metres long, behind the driver’s cabin.[1] They said they had copied methods from the film Pushpa.[1] The STF SP said the consignment was to be dumped in Maihar and then distributed across districts in the Mahakaushal, Bundelkhand and Vindhya regions to meet New Year demand.[1] A white car, registration MP 65 C 4716, had followed as a support vehicle; its occupants fled and were being traced.[1] The STF was still searching for the truck owner and other members of the network.[1] Police told the Free Press Journal that the tip named a truck coming from Sambal in Odisha.[3]