Police have recovered around 17.5 kg of smuggled gold and arrested a member of a gold smuggling ring from the capital’s Mirpur area on Monday morning.
Darussalam police station officer-in-charge Rafiqul Islam said they seized 150 pieces of gold bars, weighting 17.441 kilogrammes, from a gold smuggler at Mirpur Majar Road near Gabtoli at around 8:00am.
“Identified as Mohammad Zahidul Islam, the 35-year-old gold smuggler was arrested when he was trying to board a bus from the Gabtoli Bus Terminal for his village home in Kaliganj of Jhenidah with the gold worth around Tk65 million,” he added.
Police also said during the primary interrogation, the arrested confessed that he had received the gold from another member of their gold smuggling ring from the capital’s Paltan area and was supposed to smuggle the gold to India through the Jhenidah border.
When asked, the OC refused to disclose the details of the smuggling ring saying: “Zahidul has been placed on a 4-day remand for questioning.”
Assistant commissioner of Police (Mirpur Zone) Shakhawat Hossain said a police team, who had set up a check post on Majara Road, recovered the gold during a body and luggage search of the detained person who was on his way to the Gabtoli bus terminal.
“The man had been passing through the area on foot with a bag in his hand. When the police questioned him, finding his attitude suspicious, he had tried to run away. But the police caught him and recovered the gold from his bag,” he added. According to sources, the gold has been smuggled into the country through air freight from a Middle Eastern country.
Sources in the police, Rapid Action Battalion and Customs Department said seizure of smuggled gold has become a recurring issue in the capital and elsewhere in the country, mainly at airports, as the gold smugglers have intensified their activities over the last one year.
Meanwhile, another source said as the country’s entire jewellery sector usually depends on smuggled gold since there are no provisions or laws for importing gold commercially, the smuggling trend has been intensified since the Indian government imposed restrictions on gold imports last year.
They also added, smugglers have chosen Bangladesh as a stopover point along its smuggling routes into India from various Middle Eastern countries.
Sources in the Customs department said as the gold smuggling activities have intensified, seizure of such smuggled caches have also turned frequent and around a thousand kilogramme of gold was seized in the last fifteen months from different airports and other points of the country.
