Customs officials at the Kempegoda International Airport (KIA), on Sunday, caught six passengers in two separate cases and recovered over 10 kg of gold biscuits worth ₹3.4 crore from them.
In the first case, the officials identified a bag at the luggage scanner containing yellow metal concealed in speakers of a music system from a Singapore-bound flight on Sunday night.
Checked-in bags were scanned during the primary scanning and on suspicion, marked for further verification. The officials put the bag on the conveyor belt in the last row to identify of owner but no one picked it up.
Subsequently, the ground handling staff picked up the bag from the belt and ascertained the details of the passenger through the tag. The owner was later identified as Noorulayne, a Singapore national, who was detained for further investigations.
On opening the suitcase, two cartons were found bearing speakers. The bottoms of the speakers were wound with black insulation tape. On removal of the tape, a yellow metal item was found wrapped inside. Further examination revealed that they contained gold biscuits of 100 gram each. The biscuits were removed one by one from each of the speakers and a total of 92 gold biscuits weighing 100 grams each were recovered. The gold biscuits totally weighing 9.2 kg is valued at ₹3.02 crore, the officials said.
This is one of the biggest single case gold seizures by the city’s Airport Customs in recent times, officials said.
Second case
In another case on the same day, officers of Airport Customs seized gold weighing 1.16 kg valued at ₹38.35 lakh from five passengers who arrived from Bahrain. The passengers Md. Ali, Abdul Kadir, Nagoor Mevan, Sathik Batcha and Shahul Hameed, were intercepted by Customs Officers at the airport on the basis of information and scanning of their checked-in baggages.
“The passengers, residents of Chennai, Tamil Nadu, arrived from Bahrain. Each passenger had concealed two gold biscuits each weighing 233.28 gm, wrapped in adhesive tape and kept between clothes in their checked-in baggage,” Harsh Vardhan Umre, Additional Commissioner of Customs, said.
