Custom officials seized 100 gold bars worth Tk5.30 crore from Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport yesterday.
The gold bars, weighing around 11.7kg were seized from a flight of Flydubai Airlines around 10am, said Farid Al-Mamun, assistant commissioner of custom intelligence.
Joint Commissioner of Customs Kazi Mohammad Ziauddin, who led the operation, told the Dhaka Tribune: “Earlier we received information that illegal gold was being smuggled via this flight. We started searching this morning, however, the gold was recovered from under a seat of the flight and not from any passenger.”
The smugglers had made a plan to transfer the gold with the help of dishonest officials at the airport, they kept it under a seat as they knew the passengers would be searched, he said.
“This is an old technique of gold smugglers. In recent times we have recovered gold bars from under seats and washrooms of planes. The smugglers first take the flight and hide the gold bars somewhere inside the plane. After landing, the dishonest airport officials hand over the gold in exchange for a huge sum of money,” said the joint commissioner.
Farid Al-Mamun, said: “We remain extra cautious about gold smugglers in particular, in case of flights that arrive from Dubai, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and Singapore. We hope to stop this trend of smugglers with tighter security measures.”
No one was arrested in this connection.