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Customs officials at the Hyderabad International Airport had struck gold, literally, by confiscating 18 kg of the yellow metal in a single instance of smuggling from three Singapore passport holders on their arrival in the early hours of Friday. The gold was valued at Rs 5.4 crore.
The officials arrested the three persons after each of them were found hiding gold biscuits weighing 6 kgs in their trousers and shoes. They were intercepted by the Air Intelligence Unit when they arrived from Singapore in Tiger Air Lines flight just 40 minutes past mid night.
Though the number of cases where the international passengers had got caught at the Hyderabad airport while smuggling gold increased in the recent times, the customs officials said this was the biggest catch in a single operation.
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Prior to this incident, the customs department had detected 20 cases of smuggling this year involving 16 kgs of gold valued at Rs 4.8 crore. It had arrested 13 people in this connection.
The Centre had imposed quantitative restrictions on the import of gold earlier this year in a bid to contain the current account deficit besides raising the customs duty to 10% on standard gold. Consequently, gold prices in the country remained much higher compared to the prices in the neighboring countries. This has prompted Indian as well as foreign nationals to secretly bring gold into the country to cash in on the arbitrage opportunity, according to officials.
"Passengers have admitted their offense and revealed that to avoid payment of customs duty on gold they had smuggled the same," M K Singh, commissioner of Customs department, who supervised the operation, said.
According to Singh, passengers are usually concealing gold in the false bottom of bags, inner garments, secret pockets of trousers and inside the soles of the shoes.
