Kerala Home Minister Ramesh Chennithala announced an Anti-Narcotics Investigation Team for high-value cases with interstate and international connections during a September 18, 2026 press conference in Thiruvananthapuram. Akashvani reported that he said the team had begun work the previous day. The announcement formed part of the second phase of Operation Toofan and prioritised tracing principal sources of drug supply.
The Kerala Police programme page records that Operation Toofan was launched on June 2, 2026 at Cotton Hill School in Thiruvananthapuram. It describes cooperation with the education, health and excise departments, public participation and plans for coordination with police chiefs in other southern states. The page also identifies digital channels for receiving information about drug distribution, with protection for informants.
Police records from the operation already documented investigations crossing state boundaries. In a June 30 account, Angamaly Police said its officers and the Ernakulam Rural DANSAF team arrested two people with 12 kilograms of cannabis. Police alleged that the drugs had been purchased in Odisha and described a rail journey through Chennai before the arrests at Angamaly railway station. Those details are police allegations, not findings of guilt.
A separate September 13 Palakkad Police account reported a joint search by Thrithala Police and the DANSAF team in Vellattur. It recorded the seizure of 163.12 grams of suspected MDMA and the arrest of three people. The report also described an electronic weighing scale and material recovered from accommodation and a nearby passage. It provides a dated account of local enforcement immediately before the specialist team's announcement.
The new team's stated focus adds dedicated investigation of larger interstate and international cases to the local searches already recorded under Toofan. The earlier Angamaly case supplies a concrete example of a transport route investigated across several states, while the Thrithala report describes a local seizure. The September announcement identified upstream suppliers as the next investigative priority; it did not report convictions in either of those earlier cases.
