Bengaluru : Four postal employees have been arrested for running a sophisticated and well-oiled illegal drug racket in cahoots with local peddlers for the past six months.

City police chief Bhaskar Rao announced the sensational arrests on Monday.

H Subba, 34, from Srirampuram, Ramesh Kumar, 47, from Devarachikkanahalli, Syed Majid Ahmed, 54, from RT Nagar, and Vijaya Rajan, 58, from Nagavara, are the arrested suspects. They worked in the General Post office and at a post office in Chamarajpet. Two of them worked in the sorting division. The other two worked as a security guard or peon.

The CCB raided the gang after a suspected drug peddler arrested in a previous case spilled the beans. The CCB seized drugs worth Rs 20 lakh, including 339 ecstasy tablets, 10 grams of MDMA crystal powder and 30 grams of brown sugar that had arrived from the Netherlands, Canada and the US.

This is how the gang worked: Drug peddlers would buy illegal drugs from abroad on fake addresses. The peddlers would pay the postal employees, who had been in the current jobs for years, Rs 50,000 to Rs 1.5 lakh for prior information about the arrival of the parcel.

The postal employees knew how to cut the corners and would deliver these parcels without running the mandatory checks on them. Thus, peddlers would easily get drugs, said Kuldeep Kumar Jain, Deputy Commissioner of Police.

The postal employees would also steal other drug parcels and sell them to local peddlers or their own contacts to make an extra buck.

All four were booked under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act. The CCB said the arrests helped it bust an international drug racket and more than 2,000 drug abusers.