City cops fail to make any headway in probe

Probe into the racket to illegally source cheap Remdesivir medicine from Bangladesh, and sell it in Ahmedabad at exorbitant price to relatives of Covid-19 patients, has made no headway.

The main perpetrators of the crime - Ahmedabad-based medicine stockist Parth Goyani, his associates Sandip and Yash Mathukiya and Parth's partner Shekhar Adroja - are in judicial custody but the anonymous middlemen who received the medicine from Bangladesh at a hotel in Agartala is nowhere to be found. PI AY Baloch, the Investigation Officer (IO) of the case, said, "Our team was unable to locate any information or whereabouts of the anonymous person in Agartala who received the illegal shipment of Remdesivir from Bangladesh and then gave it to Sandip Mathukiya who had gone there to receive it."

Mirror was the first to report that the Remdesivir seized by the Gujarat FDCA had come by air freight from Bangladesh to Agartala airport in Tripura. The payment to Bangladeshi supplier Shabir Ahmed was made through angadia firms. Sandip Mathukiya had received it from an anonymous Indian mediator of Ahmed and dispatched it to Ahmedabad via two flights on July 7 and 12.

The delay meant that the police could not get hands on hotel footage that showed the anonymous middleman delivering Remdesivir to Sandip Mathukiya at the reception of Hotel Ginger in Agartala, as too much time had elapsed. Sandip, who was arrested in July itself, couldn't tell authorities anything about him as he too had never met him in person. Police only got one lead - that of a bank of account in the name of Munir Hussain, to whom the payment for the smuggled Remdesivir was allegedly sent by Parth Goyani.