The Metropolitan Police Range Kathmandu has nabbed 374 runaway criminals from different parts of the country and presented them to the Judgement Implementation Directorate of Kathmandu District Court in the past three months.

They were wanted by the law on various criminal charges, including drug peddling, contraband trafficking and operating hundi business, said DSP Ramesh Kumar Basnet, spokesperson of the range.

Among the people arrested in the past three months were 14 people who were convicted of running a hundi racket. They were arrested from Kathmandu with Rs 24.27 million.

Hundi is an informal money transfer system that uses closed networks to transfer cash without doing a cross-border transaction with the help of brokers through a mutual agreement.

DSP Basnet said the 14 people were sent to jail and money recovered from them was handed over to the Department of Revenue Investigation.

Police say hundi transactions have increased in the country after the nationwide Covid-19 lockdown was eased in July last year.

In the past three months, Metropolitan Police Range Kathmandu also arrested 48 people who were wanted for peddling drugs and other illegal substances.

All of the arrests were made in Kathmandu, said DSP Basnet.

Police also seized from them 39 grams of brown sugar, 7,166 units of nitrazepam tablets, 2,091 units of diazepam tablets, 2,041 ampoules of phenergan, 2,235 ampoules of nurofen and 40 kg of marijuana.

According to the Narcotics Control Bureau of Nepal Police, as many as 5,607 people were arrested from across the country for drug related crimes in the first five months of the last fiscal year.

Police records show that in the fiscal year 2018/19, 4,754 persons including 149 foreigners were arrested for drug related crimes. While in the fiscal year 2017/18 police arrested 3,607 persons on drug smuggling charges—of them, 159 were foreigners.

Meanwhile, police have released contraband goods that were seized at Thankot checkpoint in Kathmandu.