Pakistan cricket team used India tours to smuggle drugs, claims former Indian official

Ramaswamy Venkata Subra Mani, a former Under Secretary in India’s Union Ministry of Home Affairs, has alleged that drug trafficking was a recurring practice among Pakistani cricket teams and delegations visiting India.

Mani named Shoaib Akhtar and Mohammad Asif, two former Pakistan cricketers whom the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) banned in 2006 after they tested positive for the banned substance nandrolone, as part of his allegation.

However, PCB’s 2006 case against Akhtar and Asif involved a doping violation, not drug trafficking or smuggling. The board’s drugs tribunal found both players guilty of using the anabolic steroid following internal dope tests conducted at the end of September 2006, and banned Akhtar for two years and Asif for one.

Pakistan withdrew both players from their squad before the team’s opening match against Sri Lanka on October 17 in Jaipur during the Champions Trophy in India.

Despite this, Mani cited the case as evidence of trafficking.

“We have reported a case of Pakistani cricketers Shoaib Akhtar and Mohammed Asif, who were sent back by the Pakistani High Commissioner after self-confessing that they were carrying drugs. That is what the ruse is. So that is the entire background. Whenever Pakistani teams and delegations came to India, they trafficked drugs here,” Mani said in a podcast.

“It’s an official policy of Pakistan to push drugs into India. They’re well-known people. They’re high-profile people. So were the other people in the Pakistan team whose names might not have been named, but the entire team consists of that, and they used to do it,” Mani said.

Mani went further, linking former Pakistan coach Bob Woolmer’s death to the alleged drug trafficking, claiming Woolmer “resisted” it.

Woolmer, the 58-year-old coach of the Pakistan cricket team, died on March 18, 2007, in Kingston, Jamaica. Hotel staff found him unconscious in his room hours after Pakistan’s shock defeat to Ireland at the 2007 Cricket World Cup, and doctors later pronounced him dead.

Jamaican police initially investigated the death as a murder, but later medical opinion pointed to natural causes. A coroner’s inquest in Jamaica ultimately returned an open verdict rather than a definitive finding. Mani’s claim does not reference this history.

Neither Akhtar, Asif nor Pakistani officials or the PCB, have responded to the allegations.