Gold worth ₹1 crore found under aircraft seat, 1 held
NEWDELHI: An airplane seat worth crores?
Customs officials at Delhi airport on Sunday stumbled upon gold worth more than ₹1 crore hidden under the seat of an Air India flight that had just landed from Muscat.
This, officials said, is the second biggest seizure of gold from Delhi airport this year.
Acting on a tip-off, officials of the customs department searched the aircraft after all the passengers had deboarded and found four gold bars, weighing one kg each, under the cushion of seat 30F. A message was immediately relayed to the staff at the green channel to stop and nab the passenger who had travelled in that seat.
“We had an input that one of the passengers travelling in AI 974 (Muscat to Delhi) was carrying gold that had been stashed under the seat cushion. Cushions of aircraft seats are detachable and the passenger had kept gold bars under it. We were not sure about the seat number though, so the team rummaged through the entire aircraft and recovered the gold bars after passengers had deboarded,” said a customs official.
The suspect, who travelled on seat 30F, a 30-year-old man from Kerala, had returned from Muscat on October 24, before flying back the next day. He then returned on October 29, when and was nabbed.
Officials suspect the involvement of airport staff in the smuggling racket. “The gold bars left behind under the seat were to be picked up by another person, possibly someone who works at the airport and had access to the aircraft. Avoiding customs, this per- son also had to sneak it out of the airport. We are yet to identify this person,” said the official.
“Since the passengers had already left, we flashed a message and asked our staff at the green channel to check the boarding pass of every passenger and stop the passenger who had travelled on 30F,” the official added. “We are probing whether he had smuggled gold earlier also. He claimed to have a business of garments,” the officer said.
Although there have been cases of smugglers hiding gold in plane seats and toilets in the past, this is the first time that a passenger has been arrested after gold was recovered from an aircraft.
“We have caught people hiding gold bars in baby diapers, stuffed in bras, the rods of perambulators, in baggage trolleys, inside a papaya and even strapped to their bodies. But we have had no breakthrough in other organised rackets where gold was found concealed in seats of the plane and toilets and taken out of the airport with the help of staffers,” said the official.
Sunday’s seizure was also the second highest this year, after 12 kilos of gold was seized by customs in January.