Navi Mumbai’s Anti-Narcotics Cell has arrested a 41-year-old Nigerian national in Taloja and seized drugs collectively valued at around Rs 3.5 crore, according to the Navi Mumbai Crime Branch. The accused, identified as Ani Ikechukwu Darlington, was arrested after police allegedly found him carrying 211 grams of mephedrone during a trap near a hotel on the Panvel-Mumbra highway.
The operation was conducted by the Anti-Narcotics Cell team led by senior inspector Sandeep Nigade on Thursday at about 6.30 pm. The police action followed a tip-off about suspected drug peddling in the Taloja area. Darlington was apprehended near the hotel and subsequently taken to his rented accommodation in Ambika building, Rohinjan village, Taloja, where a search was carried out.
The report stated that the seized contraband included mephedrone and cocaine with a combined value of around Rs 3.5 crore. The police account cited in the report specifically identified 211 grams of mephedrone, valued at Rs 6.6 lakh, as the material recovered from Darlington at the time of his arrest. The report did not provide the separate quantity or valuation of cocaine.
An FIR has been registered under provisions of the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act. The case places the arrest within a wider pattern of narcotics enforcement in the Navi Mumbai police commissionerate, which covers a rapidly expanding urban region containing residential settlements, industrial areas and transport corridors.
Nigade said Darlington had previously been arrested in 2019 in a drug-peddling case. According to the senior inspector, he had spent seven years in prison and was released on bail last year. The police statement, as reported, did not specify the earlier case details or the conditions attached to his release.
The Navi Mumbai Crime Branch said that 2,387 cases under the NDPS Act had been registered at various police stations in the commissionerate over the past five years. During the same period, 3,200 accused persons were arrested and 1,078 kg of drugs, valued at around Rs 150 crore, were seized, according to the figures provided by Nigade.
Those figures cover enforcement activity across multiple police stations rather than this individual case. They also do not establish how many cases resulted in convictions or how the seized substances were distributed by type. The latest arrest will now proceed through the legal process under the NDPS Act, with the seized material and the accused forming part of the investigation.
