Mumbai airport customs makes record seizure in one day, recovers gold worth Rs 32 crore

The seized gold at Mumbai airport. Pic/ Airport customs

In a record seizure, the Mumbai airport customs department seized 61 kgs of gold valued at Rs 32 crore and arrested seven passengers including five men and two women in two different cases, the airport customs said on Sunday.

It said that this is one of the biggest seizure in a single day in the reported history of Mumbai airport customs.

According to the officials, In the first case on November 11, four passengers of Indian nationality who landed in the city from Tanzania were found carrying the smuggled gold. The gold was in the form of 1 kg gold bars. It was concealed in the specially designed waist belts with multiple pockets. From these passengers a total 53 kgs (12, 13, 14 and 14) gold valued at Rs 28.17 crore was recovered from four passengers. The specially designed belts with UAE made gold bars concealed inside were handed over to the passengers by a person of Sudanese nationality at Doha airport in Qatar during the transit time.

They said, officials at Mumbai airport, based on the continuous monitoring of suspicious flights and building on the data-based analysis from the earlier high-quantum gold and foreign currency seizures, a systematic profiling of suspect passengers was undertaken on sensitive flights from certain places in Africa and the Middle East.

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"In the recent case of foreign currency seizure of 4.08 crores, the pattern and mode of operation noticed along with profiling of foreign national passengers and extrapolating the patterns led to success in this case and during the operation, four Indian passengers arriving from Doha in Qatar Airways Flight number QR-556 were intercepted," an official said.

The officials said, Upon investigations, they were found to be coming from Tanzania. During personal search of the said passengers, the gold bars were recovered. The gold bars were concealed on their body in a specially designed belt, having multiple pockets, wrapped around their torso. During the interrogations, all four passengers confessed that they were handed over the gold in transit at the Doha airport by an unknown Sudanese national who had not travelled with them on the flight. All the four passengers have been arrested and remanded to 14 days judicial custody by the Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate.

In another case, based on the intelligence, officers of Mumbai airport customs seized 8 kgs gold valued at Rs 3.88 crore from three passengers including one man and two women who had arrived from Dubai by a Vistara flight. Gold dust in wax form was found concealed in the waistline of the jeans pants worn by the passengers. Of the three passengers, one lady passenger in her late sixties was on wheel chairs. All three passengers have been arrested and remanded to the judicial custody. Further investigation in the matter is going on, the officials added.