LAHORE: The Police in the Gowalmandi and Shafiqabad areas of Lahore have arrested two drug dealers in separate operations, recovering a quantity of hashish and liquor from their possession.
According to police, the suspects were checked during patrolling after officers found their movements suspicious. A total of 1,300 grams of hashish and 24 bottles of liquor were recovered from them.
Gowalmandi police arrested a suspect identified as Ghazanfar, from whose possession hashish was recovered. Separately, Shafiqabad police arrested a suspect identified as Tanveer Masih and placed him behind bars.
Cases have been registered against both suspects and further legal proceedings have been initiated.
Narcotics cases in Punjab are prosecuted under the Control of Narcotic Substances Act, under which the quantity recovered is the primary determinant of the punishment range available to the court. Recoveries are required to be sealed at the scene, with samples dispatched to the Punjab Forensic Science Agency for chemical examination. The forensic report is a central piece of evidence at trial, and cases have frequently faltered where the chain of custody between recovery and laboratory has not been properly documented.
Liquor offences are dealt with separately under the Prohibition (Enforcement of Hadd) Order, which governs the manufacture, possession and sale of intoxicating liquor.
Both Gowalmandi and Shafiqabad fall within the older, densely populated belt of the city, where narrow streets and heavy pedestrian movement make street-level distribution difficult to detect through fixed checkpoints. Patrolling-based interception, of the kind described in these two cases, remains the most common route to recovery.
Police in Lahore have described street-level dealing as the visible end of a longer supply chain, and senior officers have periodically directed investigators to work upward from arrested dealers to identify suppliers rather than closing cases at the point of recovery. Whether that line of inquiry has been pursued in these two cases has not been stated.
The suspects will be produced before a magistrate, with police expected to seek physical remand for interrogation. Police have not disclosed whether either man has a prior record of narcotics offences, or whether the recoveries in the two areas are believed to be connected.
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