Puducherry: Tamil Nadu and Puducherry police jointly busted yet another fake drug manufacturing unit in Puducherry. The police arrested M Prabhakar, 52, who was running the unit and seized drugs worth more than ₹3lakh rupees. The unit was also seized.According to the FIR filed by Mettupalayam police in Puducherry, the crime came to light when a team of Tamil Nadu Q Branch police intercepted a vehicle during a routine inspection at Mandapam in Ramanathapuram district last month. They found a large consignment of capsules (96,000 Pregabalin 150mg capsules). Inquiries revealed that the consignment was meant to be ‘exported’ to Sri Lanka.The team contacted the drug manufacturing unit based in Chennai, which supplies the capsule and found that the consignments were not sent by the company. The director of the unit, T Rajkumar, 40, who visited Mandapam and inspected the consignment told the police that fake drugs in his company’s brand name were being circulated in the market. He lodged a complaint with the drug control office, Chennai, seeking action against illegal manufacture, circulation and sale of fake drugs.Subsequent investigations revealed that the capsules were manufactured by a fake unit functioning under the name of Medinok Healthcare Pvt. Ltd at Kurumbapet, Puducherry.In a bid to gather more evidence, Rajkumar had discreetly placed an order for the said capsules from the fake unit and paid money for it. He said in the complaint that the batch numbers, labelling, packaging, trademarks and artwork of the counterfeit product supplied were deceptively similar to the genuine products.
