Just three days before its official launch in India, Apple’s latest iPhone 6s is turning up at the strangest of places. On Monday night, 22 iPhone 6s were found inside a toilet at the arrival area of Delhi airport’s Terminal 3.
The craze of showing off the latest iPhone is so high in Delhi that there are people who are willing to pay a premium to own one of these and smugglers are cashing in on the demand. On October 5, customs officials at the Indira Gandhi International Airport had detained seven youths who were carrying 182 iPhone 6s.
On Monday, the 22 iPhone 6s were found lying inside one of the terminal’s toilets by personnel of the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF). The CISF handed over the phones to the Customs department and investigations are on, said Vinayak Azaad, Additional Commissioner, Customs.
Mr. Azaad said that the Customs department has been keeping a close watch on travellers frequenting places such as Hong Kong and Singapore, from which such gadgets are usually smuggled in.
Sources at the airport said that it could be either a passenger bringing in these phones who panicked and left them at the toilet or perhaps some ground handler who has been trying to pick these up but could not.
The Customs department also seized nearly four kilogramof gold worth more than Rs.1 crore on Tuesday.
In one, the officials caught a family of three – husband, wife and daughter – that was trying to bring in a total of about 600 gram of gold from Dubai. While the husband had concealed a gold plate weighing 88 gram in mini speakers, the wife was wearing six gold bangles studded with artificial stones weighing 382 gram. Their daughter was wearing two gold bangles weighing 133 gram. The family had arrived from Dubai in a SpiceJet flight. The gold items were seized.
In another instance, Customs officials seized almost 3.3 kg of 24 carat gold biscuits from a passenger who had arrived in a domestic flight from Chennai. “The aircraft had earlier come from Dubai to Chennai. The accused got on the plane from Chennai and picked up the consignment on the domestic sector,” Mr. Azaad said.
On Monday, the 22 iPhone 6s were found lying inside one of the terminal’s toilets by personnel of the Central Industrial Security Force
