Over 35,000 pirated books, including bestsellers, seized in Capital

New Delhi, Aug 22 (UNI) The Delhi police has unravelled a secret underground network of producing and distributing pirated books with seizure of a huge stock of such books from foreign publishers.

More than 13,000 books, amounting to Rs 35 lakh, have been seized by the Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of the Delhi Police Crime Branch after several raids in various areas of Delhi.

The raids came after Anil Kumar, a famous attorney of several International publishers like Penguin, Bloomsbury publishing and Macmillan Publishers, filed a complaint at the IPR section of the EOW.

Raids carried out yesterday at two godowns in Okhla led to recovery of large quantity of covers and 47 negative rolls of popular title books. In another raid at Mandawali, 6,473 pirated books of various foreign publishers were recovered.

Two people have been arrested in this connection.

Some of the titles of the recovered books included 'The Kite Runner', 'Five Point Someone', 'The Namesake', 'The Midnight children', 'The Harry potter', among others.

Interrogation of the accused revealed that they had organised the sale and distribution of those books in more or less legitimate business with their own network of sale through retailers in and around the capital.

UNI AR GL ND2036