A 24-year-old man from Kodagu landed at Bengaluru’s Kempegowda International Airport with gold paste worth Rs 55 lakh hidden in custom-stitched jeans and underwear. The smuggling attempt reportedly unfolded after IndiGo airlines flight 6E 1486 landed from Dubai.
A report in Times of India quoted its sources with the air intelligence unit of Bengaluru Customs as saying that the sleuths noticed something unusual about Kodagu youth after on his arrival in the early hours of Sunday.
The suspect was then frisked and his luggage checked. Sleuths closely examined the black jeans he was wearing and found pouches of gold paste stitched near the waist area, the report stated.
His underwear had more such pouches. Sleuths recovered 907gm of gold paste from the youth and booked him for smuggling and Customs duty evasion, the publication mentioned.
Last month too, the Customs officials had caught a passenger who was trying to smuggle gold paste weighing 284 grams. The man landed at Kempegowda International Airport from Sharjah with gold paste hidden in the fly of his pants.
Reports stated that the gold was concealed in a cover stitched along the zipline. The officials also recovered 3,300 foreign-brand cigarette sticks and 324 packets of cosmetics from his luggage. The total worth of the seized items is Rs 18.5 lakh.
In September, the Border Security Force (BSF) had arrested a woman who was crossing into India from Bangladesh while hiding gold paste weighing 781.86 grams in her private parts and two luggage. The three units of gold paste was worth Rs 47 lakh.
Minister of State for Finance Pankaj Chaudhary a few days ago presented government data on gold smuggling. According to the document, seizure of smuggled gold rose to a record high of 3,917.52 kg in January-October this year.
As many as 4,798 cases of gold smuggling were recorded till October 2023, and the quantity of gold seized stood at 3,917.52 kg, according to the data.
The data revealed that 3,502.16 kg of smuggled gold was seized in the country in 2022 and 3,982 smuggling cases were detected. In 2021, 2,383 kg of smuggled gold was seized and 2,445 cases detected while in 2020, 2,155 kg of smuggled gold was seized and 2,567 cases were detected.
“To deter smuggling, customs field formations and Directorate of Revenue Intelligence keep constant vigil and take operational measures such as passenger profiling, risk-based interdiction and targeting of cargo consignments, supply chain interventions, non-intrusive inspection, rummaging of carriers, including aircraft, and keep coordination with other agencies. Field formations are regularly sensitised to new methods of smuggling,” Chaudhary said.
To a question on whether the involvement of foreign nationals working as syndicate along with the Indian citizens in the smuggling has been reported, he said seven cases of such involvement have been reported since 2020.
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