Bengaluru: The Special Investigation Team (SIT) probing a fake medicine racket in Karnataka detained its alleged kingpin at Bengaluru airport early on Monday, police said.
Senior police officials confirmed the arrest of Prashant Rajanbabu, who had fled to Azerbaijan and was detained while trying to enter India.
“As of now, we have detained (the culprit) early this morning. We need to complete arrest formalities and begin interrogation,” a senior police officer told ThePrint. “We were tracking his movements and kept surveillance.”
The arrest comes over a month after raids by Karnataka’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) unearthed a fake medicine racket on the outskirts of Bengaluru.
#WATCH | Bengaluru, Karnataka | Key accused Prashanth Rajan Babu arrested in fake medicines sales network case
(Video source: Bengaluru Police) pic.twitter.com/mhzQKlNWRk
— ANI (@ANI) September 28, 2026
Prashanth’s arrest is a breakthrough in a case that has serious implications for a large number of the population as it involved fake medicines supplied to major hospitals in India’s IT capital and other parts of the southern state.
The discovery of fake medicines has fuelled a wave of distrust among consumers since these distributors supplied life-saving drugs, including those for cancer treatment, to several reputed hospitals.
On 18 August, the FDA discovered the racket during raids at a farmhouse in Bidadi, Bengaluru South district, leading to the discovery of spurious drugs and industrial machinery worth an estimated Rs 5.05 crore.
Soon after the raids, it was reported that Prashant had fled the country and holed up in Azerbaijan.
However, police officers say that more details of their operations and others involved are only likely to emerge once Prashant has been formally arrested and interrogated.
At the time, Karnataka Health Minister U.T. Khader had hinted that this was likely an inter-state racket since the fake medicines were produced in Himachal Pradesh, Telangana and other places before being brought into the state.
According to the health department, the racket involved using cheaper drugs which were allegedly refilled into new vials and relabelled to counterfeit expensive life-saving brands of multinational corporations (MNCs), specifically imitating imported products under the brand name ‘Pfizer’.
“To deceive buyers and maximize illicit profits, the counterfeit labels featured QR/scanning codes, which were found to be completely nonfunctional upon verification. These spurious drugs contain no active medicinal components, the wrong ingredients, or toxic substances, posing a fatal threat to public health,” according to an earlier statement by the state health department.
So far, the licenses of 17 pharmaceutical distributors have been cancelled and eight others have been suspended for their alleged role in distributing fake medicines.
The licence of Pfizer C & F on the outskirts of Bengaluru was also suspended.
In a response to ThePrint on 22 September, Pfizer said it has been working with authorities since the racket was busted. “We have been working with the authorities for the past month since the matter of counterfeit medicines was brought to our attention,” Pfizer said in its response.
“Since then, we have taken several actions to support the investigation, including removing Pfizer batches (where batch numbers were copied by counterfeit) from the market to avoid confusion, supporting to differentiate between original and counterfeit product, and providing technical and other relevant information related to the affected batches,” it added.
(Edited by Sugita Katyal)