Customs officials arrested an Indian national with 8kg of gold bars, 11,225 flash memory cards, and 11 iPhones worth Tk30m at the Shahjalal International Airport yesterday.
The Indian national named Deepak Kumar Acharya, 60, was arrested after he landed in Dhaka from Hong Kong by a Hong Kong-Dhaka-Kolkata flight of Biman Bangladesh Airlines.
The plane landed in Dhaka at 9:30pm on Monday and left for Kolkata at 11:30am yesterday. Deepak was arrested during the transit period.
Customs Commissioner at the airport Zakiya Sultana told the Dhaka Tribune that they had searched the Indian national for his suspicious movements and recovered 65 gold bars along with other illegal items from his possession.
“It seemed he had been trying to hand over the gold, memory cards and phone sets to somebody in Bangladesh as he had been going to the washroom repeatedly,” she said.
Deepak had visited Bangladesh as a businessman many times and claimed during primary interrogation that he had been just a carrier of the gold.
The airport is a haven for smugglers of gold, diamond, currencies and other precious materials. It is alleged that a section of unscrupulous airport officials and employees help these rackets.
Gold business in Bangladesh largely thrives on smuggled gold as none of 30,000 jewellery shops in the country import gold through legal way.
Official record shows that there is only one instance of gold import through the airport in the past two years while around 300kg of gold and a large quantity of precious metals and stones were seized at the airport in the past seven months. In the biggest ever haul, 124.4kg of gold was seized on July 24.
Over 3,600 people, including personnel of customs, civil aviation, National Security Intelligence and airline crew, were arrested for their involvement in the smuggling process in the last three years.
