Gold worth Rs 2 cr seized at international airport; 2 held

The Air Intelligence Unit (AIU) of the Customs department from the Mumbai international airport has arrested two persons in possession of illegal gold bars valued at Rs 2.32 crore.

An AIU official said they received specific intelligence on Saturday that two passengers on a domestic flight from Kozhikode to Mumbai will be carrying smuggled gold. An AIU team with four officers immediately rushed to Terminal-1 to intercept the passengers and rummage the aircraft.

The passengers were identified only as Vijender alias Satyam and Navneet alias

Sumeet, both residents of Rohtak in Haryana. The duo was interdicted and on detailed interrogation, both passengers handed over four smuggled U-shaped 24 Karat gold bars adding up to 5 kg in total, AIU sources said.

“The gold bars were cleverly concealed in fabric belts which were further placed and fixed around the pipes beneath the passenger's seats in Abu Dhabi during the aircraft’s Abu DhabiCochin leg. The same aircraft got converted into a domestic route Cochin-Mumbai, and then MumbaiKozhikode,” an AIU official said, adding that the passengers retrieved the gold after boarding the same aircraft at Kozhikode, when it was coming to Mumbai.

He added that both the passengers were offered Rs 20,000 each for smuggling the gold. “During the interrogation, it was revealed that both the passengers were travelling on forged identity (Aadhar) cards. We are now probing who was the supplier of the gold bars and to whom they were meant to be sold to and where,” the official said. Officials would also be probing from where the duo had managed to get forged identity documents.

Both the passengers were offered Rs 20,000 each for smuggling the gold