DELHI: At around 9.30 pm on April 13, a foreigner dressed in a pink shirt and blue jeans emerged from the T3 gate at the Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi. With two black trolley bags in tow, he started walking towards the pre-paid taxi booth.
If a movie were to be made on the life of Armando Lopes Reyes, the turning point would be what happened next.
Within seconds, he was identified by an informer and boxed in by three policemen. And within hours, investigators had prised out of those two bags 1.3 kg of “pure cocaine” worth Rs 6.5 crore, one of the biggest seizures in Delhi Police history.
Two weeks later, police are still connecting the dots to trace this new cocaine trail, spanning over 14,400 km, all the way from Brazil’s Sao Paulo to New Delhi via Dubai. What they have in hand, meanwhile, are clues to a parallel mystery: How did a 64-year-old clothes merchant from Lima in Peru, a father of seven, end up in Tihar jail?
“As far as I know, this is the first time Delhi Police have arrested a Peruvian smuggling an illegal drug into the country,” said a senior police officer. And from what Reyes has told his interrogators, through a Spanish translator based in Delhi, it’s the story of a “family man” lured into being a cocaine carrier so that he could take care of his wife and children, five of whom are still in school. “Reyes said he sold clothes at his hometown in Lima, where he lived with his second wife and seven children. Two children are from a previous marriage — they are grown up and work in the clothes market,” the translator, who did not wish to be identified, told The Indian Express. “He said that his children were growing up fast and so were his expenses. To make more money, he said, he began buying cloth material and readymade garments from Peru, Bolivia and Brazil and selling them in Ecuador for thrice the profit,” he added. “On one such trip to Sao Paulo, late in 2014, he said he was having a drink at a restaurant when a man who identified himself as Juan struck up a conversation with him. He claimed that Juan offered air fare and US$ 1500 to smuggle cocaine to India — US$ 1000 at the airport and US$ 500 on return. He told us that Juan handed over the two bags at the Sao Paulo airport,” the translator said. Reyes also told interrogators that he flew to India thrice in 2014 – to Kolkata, where he stayed from May 1-20 and July 6-22, and Mumbai from October 6-November 5 – but claimed that he did not carry any drugs with him.
