Kerala gold smuggling suspect and her aide arrested
Swapna Suresh had been in hiding for over a week
Swapna Suresh, the woman at the centre of the sensational gold smuggling racket in Kerala, has finally been arrested, a week after she went on the run.
Information coming out say that she and an accomplice were arrested by the National Investigative Agency (NIA) in Bengaluru and that she will be brought back to Kerala today. The arrest comes just a day after NIA, which is the key Indian agency handling terror related crimes, was appointed on Friday to oversee the case.
Swapna is an accused in a case involving the smuggling of 30kg of gold — worth Dh6 million plus — from the UAE. The package was picked up at Thiruvananthapuram International Airport in a package meant for the UAE Consul-General.
Raising questions
The arrest will also raise questions about how Swapna, who was born in Abu Dhabi and also worked there with an international airline, managed to evade Kerala police and managed to reach all the way to Bengaluru — in the neighbouring state of Kerala — by road. Especially, when there are extensive restrictions on movements across large parts of Kerala to bring down spread of the Covid-19.
Lockdown rules
According to a senior Kerala Police official: “It will be an embarrassment for the state police that she managed to cover more than 700 kilometres between Thiruvananthapuram and Bengaluru despite all the lockdown restrictions. And despite her face being a key part of blanket media coverage through these days.”