On September 24, newspapers gave a startling account of DRI’s Operation Numkhor, which brought to light racketeering in second-hand, high-end Bhutanese cars, particularly in the state of Kerala. A raid by the Customs Preventive Wing on September 23 across 30 locations in Kerala, including at the homes of some famous actors, resulted in seizure of around 39 high-end second-hand Bhutanese vehicles.

The action-packed events seem like a script of a Frederick Forsyth novel. The plot mixes smuggling agents based in Jaigaon and Coimbatore in India and Phuentsholing in Bhutan, involvement of a Royal Bhutanese army official, Nagaland and Kerala natives, forged army documents, insignias, fake registrations, high-profile film stars, tax evasions, and hints of money laundering.

Reading about Operation Numkhor (‘Numkhor’ in Bhutan’s Dzongkha language simply means “vehicle") brings to mind Operation Cedar, Operation Smokescreen, Operation Phone Flash and Operation Titan launched by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) of USA in 2011 against the terror organisation Hezbollah. These operations led officials around the world—from Panama and Colombia in South America, to the battlefields of Iraq, and to the heart of Europe. It led them to characters like Oussama Salhab, a Hezbollah operative who sold used cars in West Africa and directed his traffickers based in Benin, Ghana, and Togo to transport tens of millions of dollars to Beirut. It led investigators to the Lebanese Canadian Bank, designated by the US Treasury Department as a primary money-laundering concern in February 2011.

Joumaa had been laundering hundreds of millions of dollars per month through the bank’s accounts and through the accounts of a Lebanese Canadian Bank subsidiary in The Gambia, Prime Bank, which was partly owned by a prominent Hezbollah supporter. One key........

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