Chennai: A woman associate of Sri Lankan gangster Angoda Lokka and her husband have been arrested by the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) with 3kg of hashish valued at about ₹75 lakh.NCB’s Chennai zonal unit identified the Madurai-based couple as Sivagamasundari and Gurumurthy. Acting on specific intelligence, officers intercepted the couple near the Porur toll plaza in Chennai when they were about to board a bus. A search of their belongings led to the drug seizure.Investigators said Sivagamasundari was a close associate of Angoda Lokka and had earlier been arrested by the Tamil Nadu CB-CID in a case registered in 2020 for fabricating identity and other supporting documents for the gangster and facilitating his illegal stay in India.Angoda Lokka, whose real name was Maddumage Lasantha Chandana Perera, was wanted in cases including murder, extortion and drug smuggling. Sri Lankan police said he fled the country by boat from Mannar in March 2017.After Lokka died in Coimbatore in July 2020, Sivagamasundari posed as his relative and submitted an Aadhaar card identifying him as Pradeep Singh while completing formalities for his postmortem.NCB officials said they were probing the source of the hashish, its intended recipients in Sri Lanka and others involved in the transnational trafficking network.Officials said that the Chennai unit has seized about 2,916kg of ganja, 77.67kg of hashish oil, 13.04kg of hashish, 1.79kg of amphetamine and 2,799 LSD so far this year. The seizures, valued at around ₹27.8 crore, led to the arrest of 48 people.
