Four days after handing life bans to three lifters for their second dope offences, the Indian Weightlifting Federation on Wednesday said five lifters tested positive for banned drugs during the Senior National Championships in Udaipur in February.
IWF secretary Sahadev Yadav said the Punjab unit is banned for two years, as two out of the five lifters who tested positive belong to the state.
Under IWF rules, a state unit faces a ban for two years if at least two of its lifters test positive.
"Gurpreet Singh (men's +105kg) and Paramjit Kaur (women's 69kg) are from Punjab and we have handed a two-year ban on Punjab as two of their lifters tested positive," Yadav said.
The other three lifters are Manjinder Singh (men's 62kg, Chandigarh), Bhagat Singh (men's 94kg, Madhya Pradesh) and Pradeep Sharma (men's 77kg, Police).
"All five of them have been handed provisional two-year suspension. We had taken a large number of urine samples in the Senior Nationals as we wanted to have a crackdown on the doping menace," Yadav added.
"Each lifter has been fined Rs 50,000 each but the fine will be paid by the state units concerned and not the individual lifters, as has been decided by the executive board in Udaipur. The state unit will not be allowed to take part in any IWF competition till the fines are given," he added.
The IWF had last week slapped life bans on Vicky Batta (56kg), G Damodaran (105kg) and Rajesh Kumar Singh (94kg) for second dope offences.
Batta, a 2006 Commonwealth Games silver medallist, returned a positive test during the 2007 National Games in Guwahati and was among the six lifters caught for doping in out-of-competition tests by WADA in Pune last September.
Damodaran tested positive in the Inter-Services Meet in Jamnagar in November last year. He first flunked dope test in the 2006 Senior National Championships in Visakhapatnam.
Rajesh Kumar was also one of the six lifters who flunked dope tests in the WADA out-of-competition tests last September which led to IWF being handed a fine of US $5 lakh by the international body. He first tested positive in the 2006 Inter-Services Meet in Jamnagar.
