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Residents of Sailulak, a quiet village in northeastern India that lies close to the border with Myanmar, found two things out of the ordinary in the summer of 2019.First, there were the unrelenting monsoon rains, earlier than usual. And then there were the four young strangers who began frequenting the area, carrying six large nylon bags.
The young men claimed to be buying dried red chilies. When the suspicious villagers called the region's excise department, officers found -- neatly packed beneath the dehydrated red peppers -- 60 bundles of 10,000 methamphetamine tablets each. The men had spent hours ferrying the consignment across the rain-drenched muddy tracks from Dawn village in Myanmar to Sailulak in India.