On November 29, a passenger from Dubai, Syed Nadeem Ur Rehaman arrived in Chennai and was seemingly in a hurry to leave the terminal.
Customs officials, who grew suspicious, checked his baggage. It had some cosmetics, toy cars, tiger balm and nail cutters but all of these hidden inside deftly.
Wondering why these should be hidden, they opened the articles one after the other. They discovered thin pieces of gold underneath the bottle caps of tiger balm, face cream boxes and gold concealed in the base of toy cars. They recovered 286 g of gold worth ₹14.12 lakh from him.
From hiding gold in wrist watches to footwear straps, there have been numerous such cases during lockdown where passengers have attempted to smuggle gold into the country. This despite there being limited number of international flights. There have been 218 cases of gold smuggling and 52 persons have been arrested. In the lockdown period, customs officials have seized 83.35 kg of gold worth ₹37.55 crore at Chennai airport. Recently, there were some passengers who tried to smuggle gold by bringing them as foil and wrap them in layers in the covers of carton boxes too. While a few have tried to stitch gold paste within the jeans, gold has been hidden even under medical bandage and under mobile covers too.
Rajan Chaudhary, Commissioner of Customs, Chennai Airport, says as soon as the relief flights and subsequently followed by air-bubble flights started operating from West Asia, gold smuggling resumed. “Not many flights are operating in Chennai as compared to other airports but we have been making good seizures. We are trying to be thorough in profiling passengers, physical checking, scanning, and this has resulted in preventing smuggling to a great extent,” he says.
He said in a majority of the cases, passengers have tried to hide gold in the form of a paste in their rectum. “This is obviously difficult to detect. So, we have developed a network and based on intelligence inputs, we have been able to find these cases,” he added.
