Bottles of illegal liquor wrapped properly in a white shroud, instead of a dead body, were found inside an ambulance on its way to Bihar’s Muzaffarpur from Jharkhand’s Ranchi. The State excise department officials, though, were not surprised by the collection of spirits inside a coffin as they earlier had received a tip-off of the liquor smuggling.
The excise officials on Monday seized as many as 212 IMFL (Indian-made foreign liquor) bottles, amounting to nearly 159 litres, from the ambulance near Dheerja bridge on the Bihar-Jharkhand border.
Two persons, driver Lalit Kumar Mahto of Ranchi and Pankaj Yadav of the Chatra district, in Jharkhand, were inside the ambulance. When the excise officials started searching the ambulance, they told them that a dead body was inside the coffin and even let the officials speak to the grieving family members. They also produced a death certificate to the excise officials, but the date of the death written on the certificate was mismatched.
On the same day on March 27, a huge consignment of liquor bottles worth lakhs of rupees was seized from inside a septic tank in the Saharsa district, while a day after, hundreds of liquor bottles were recovered from a graveyard in the Vaishali district. Every day, smugglers of illegal liquor in dry Bihar dig out new ways to ferry bottles into the State.
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/liquor-bottles-seized-from-coffin-inside-an-ambulance-in-bihar/article66671834.ece