A local court sentenced three men from Tamil Nadu to 10 years of imprisonment in Assam for smuggling a banned cough syrup with high codeine content named Phensedyl.
The arrested men, Mohammed Rafi (42), A.S. Bakrudeen (39) and H. Fazzalu Ahmed, all belonging from Rasipuram in Tamil Nadu's Namakkal district, were apprehended by Assam police in August 2016 for illegally bringing 15,000 plastic bottles of the banned drug into Assam in a truck laden with rubber products enroute Tripura.
"A team led by Bureau of Investigation for Economic Offences (BIEO) inspector Binay Kalita followed intelligence inputs to apprehend the truck on the highway near Guwahati. Samples of the seized cough syrup were sent for forensic test after a case was filed against the trio on August 9, 2016," Shyamal Prasad Saikia, BIEO's superintendent of police, said on Tuesday.