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Rats in India have been accused of eating hundreds of kilograms of cannabis, confiscated by police from drug dealers and kept in their warehouses, according to CNN, Friday, November 25, 2022.
“Rats are small animals that do not fear the police,” said a court in Mathura, Uttar Pradesh, after learning that local police had been unable to provide evidence in a recent case of around 200kg of confiscated cannabis that was supposed to be used.
According to court documents, she asked the police to provide evidence including 386 kg of cannabis, but the prosecution notified the court that 700 kg of marijuana confiscated by the police had been infested with rats in various police stations in the city.
This is not the first time that rats have hit stores, according to allegations. The judge who heard the case said that the Mathura police blamed the rodents for destroying more than 500 kg of cannabis, after confiscating it in various cases and storing it at Shergarh and Highway police stations in the city.
The court then instructed the police to put the cannabis up for auction or dispose of it.
The court document also stated that "almost all police stations are threatened by rats. Accordingly, the necessary measures must be taken to protect the cannabis being confiscated."
However, there is some confusion about the details of the sequence of events that followed the rats' ingestion of cannabis.
Martand Prakash Singh, the Mathura city chief of police, spoke to CNN after the court hearing. He told the US network that the cannabis was "destroyed by rains and floods," not rats.
And Singh added, "There was no reference to rats in the report submitted to the court... The police only mentioned that the confiscated cannabis was destroyed by rains and floods."
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