Indian police arrest man for selling moonshine that killed 102

Police in New Delhi yesterday claimed to have arrested the man responsible for supplying the toxic moonshine that killed 102 people in Mumbai last week.

Officials said Latif Khan (26) was responsible for distributing the alcohol, which also resulted in some 45 people being hospitalised, many of them still in a critical condition.

Seven others, including two women, were arrested over the weekend in Mumbai in connection with the illicit liquor deaths.

Police said the drink was sold from speakeasies in Mumbai’s slums whose poor residents cannot afford the more expensive and safer brands of alcohol, sold largely through state-run outlets.

Khan is believed to have transported the moonshine from neighbouring Gujarat state and delivered it to local dealers in Mumbai, before escaping to Delhi.

Gujarat is India’s only state where prohibition has been in force ever since independence in 1947 out of regard for Mahatma Gandhi, who was from there and who championed temperance movements.

Consequently Gujarat, also the home state of prime minister Narendra Modi, has become a major centre for producing moonshine, distributed widely via organised bootlegger syndicates.

Mumbai police said the liquor deaths were due to poisoning by Methanol, a highly toxic form of alcohol that is normally used as anti-freeze liquid and as fuel.

It is often added to bootleg liquor in India to increase the alcohol content cheaply. If the dosage is too high, it results in a concoction that can induce blindness and lead to a painful death by poisoning.

At times, certain herbs or other chemicals are also added to the mixture to hasten the distillation process, leading to fatal outcomes once ingested, police said.

Unrecorded deaths

Mumbai’s liquor deaths follow numerous similar incidents that occur almost daily in shanty neighbourhoods across the country, but go largely unrecorded.

According to the

Lancet

, the British medical journal, about two-thirds of all alcohol consumed in India is moonshine.

In January, 29 people died after drinking toxic alcohol in northern Uttar Pradesh state, while another 126 perished for similar reasons in eastern Bengal province in late 2011.

The legal types of alcohol available in the country – known as Indian Made Foreign Liquor or IMFL – are produced from molasses, a byproduct of India’s massive sugar industry. But a heavy duty on it results in it being priced beyond the reach of a majority of Indians, withabout 700ml of whisky or rum costing about €5.60.