Police in India have reportedly blamed rats for destroying 195kg of seized cannabis kept in police stations.
The police gave the explanation after they were asked to produce seized cannabis as evidence in an ongoing drug trafficking case at a court sitting in Uttar Pradesh, a state in India.
As part of the court proceedings, the police said they could not protect the seized cannabis from rats.
“Rats are tiny animals and they have no fear of the police. It’s difficult to protect the drug from them,” a police officer reportedly told the court.
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According to BBC, Sanjay Chaudhary, the trial judge, said the police officers informed him that rats had “destroyed” 195kg of the seized cannabis.
Chaudhary said some 700kg of marijuana seized by the police in Mathura district are “under danger of infestation by rats”.
The trial judge said since rats are “fearless”, the only way to protect seized illicit drugs is to auction the drugs to research labs and medicine firms and give the income to the government.
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However, MP Singh, a senior police officer of Mathura district, told reporters that some of the illicit drugs in their custody had been “damaged due to heavy rains” and not by rats.
This is not the first time rodents have been linked to eating or destroying seized illicit drugs kept in facilities of security agencies.
In October 2022, Nigeria’s National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) had said a rat strayed into its exhibit room and “got high on cannabis”.
In 2018, eight police officers in Argentina were sacked after they blamed mice for the disappearance of half a ton of cannabis from a police warehouse.
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Their claims were, however, countered by forensic experts who argued that the mice could not have mistaken drugs for food, and if it really happened, a lot of corpses would have been found in the warehouse.
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