Operation Trident: 1,424 accounts frozen, 18 held as agencies hit a Myanmar drug money network in the Northeast

Central agencies and police in three northeastern states have frozen 1,424 bank accounts and arrested 18 people in a coordinated strike on a drug trafficking network that moved narcotics and money across the Myanmar border, Union Home Minister Amit Shah said on Sunday.

The raids, under the name Operation Trident, were carried out on 23 October at 38 places in Assam, Mizoram and Manipur by the Enforcement Directorate (ED), the Narcotics Control Bureau and state police. Shah said they uncovered about ₹100 crore in hawala transactions and turned up 500 detonators and ₹12 lakh in cash. Officials have not said what the detonators were meant for.

“Modi govt deals another lethal blow against drugs with Operation Trident,” Shah wrote on X, congratulating the anti-narcotics teams. Repeating the government’s aim of breaking drug networks by 31 December 2029, he added: “India will hammer until the last nail is driven into the coffin of drug cartels.”

Following the money

The ED, whose Aizawl and Imphal offices ran the money-laundering arm of the operation, said it had arrested six people, three each from Mizoram and Manipur. Two of them were already in judicial custody in narcotics cases. It has provisionally attached Hotel JTS, a five-storey building at Zion Veng in Champhai valued at ₹17.82 crore, which it said is registered to the husband of a hawala operator. With money already secured from frozen accounts, the agency puts its total haul at more than ₹26 crore.

At the centre of the trail, the ED says, was Go Alpha Trip, a mini-ATM and money transfer counter in Churachandpur. Between 2024 and June 2026 it made 2,947 transfers worth ₹175.03 crore. People rented out their bank accounts for ₹500 for every lakh passed through them, and the money was moved on within days by online transfer, with little drawn in cash. One homemaker’s account in Champhai received ₹15.48 crore, though the family’s monthly income was about ₹27,000, the agency said.

The ED says operators charged a commission to settle suppliers’ dues in Myanmar’s currency, the kyat, and that a firm in India sent about 32 tonnes of caffeine anhydrous and 10 tonnes of aluminium chloride to front consignees in Mizoram, chemicals it believes went to tablet-pressing units across the border.

The ‘Death Triangle’

The cases grew out of three seizures: 4.7 kg of heroin at Champhai in March 2025, 49 kg of methamphetamine tablets near Seling in August 2025, and brown sugar and ₹31.43 lakh in cash at Churachandpur in July this year.

India’s northeast shares a 1,643 km border with Myanmar, and drugs typically cross at Zokhawthar before being moved through Champhai and Aizawl towards Assam and Tripura. Shah has argued that the drug-producing region long known as the Golden Triangle should be called the “Death Triangle”.

The ED said it was now looking at the role of bank officials and customer service point operators, and trying to trace the counter’s other customers and recipients in Myanmar.