After yesterday’s arrest of five people, including three top Biman officials, the detectives have concluded that a gang, comprising people in and outside the airline, has been involved with gold smuggling through the Dhaka airport for quite some time now.
One of the arrested, Captain Abu Mohammad Aslam Shaheed, is the chief of flight planning and scheduling and also the pilot of an aircraft. Tozammel Hossain and Emdad Hossain are deputy general manager and manager of flight scheduling respectively.
This is the first time that any top officials of the national flag carrier have been arrested in connection with gold smuggling. The Detective Branch (DB) of Dhaka Metropolitan Police arrested them at different parts of the capital.
Over the last couple of years, detectives and customs officials have been regularly catching gold mules from the Dhaka and Chittagong airports, but the frequency and volume have increased alarmingly this year.
Until yesterday, law enforcers and customs intelligence officers have only managed to arrest some low-level Biman employees such as cabin crew, flight attendants, ground handling staff and carriers.
In the past, smuggled gold has been seized from passengers’ bodies, hidden in their luggage, strapped under seats, abandoned at restrooms inside the aircraft or at the airports.
Intelligence officials were aware that such nature and amount of smuggling could not have been taking place without the involvement of some bigwigs from the Biman’s ground handling staff.
One of the two other people detained yesterday was Mahmudul Haque Palash, a listed contractor of Biman Bangladesh Airlines, and the other was Mohammad Harunur Rashid, a money exchange businessmen.
The Dhaka Tribune has learned that together with the outsiders, these influential officials had been practising absolute control over the flights, pilots, cabin crew and first officers.
The sources also say the smuggling racket is actually international in scope because it includes officials and individuals from several cities in the gulf including Jeddah in Saudi Arabia and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.
These two cities are know as hubs of the global gold trade. As a result, the airport authorities in these countries are not very strict about monitoring the transportation of the expensive metal, the Dhaka Tribune has learned.
According to sources, Mahmudul Haque Palash, the listed Biman contractor, is the local coordinator of the smuggling racket.
He is a former official of the national flag carrier who continued maintaining his ties with Biman as a contractor. He has also worked for the Bangladesh Air Force.
Palash’s wife Nur Zahan is a senior cabin crew of Biman. Using his wife, Palash had recently engineered the recruitment of several dozens of cabin crew, a senior Biman official said.
With the help of the officials detained yesterday, Palash used to make sure that certain flights from Jeddah and Dubai only had their people as flight staff.
At times, the Biman officials would spend as much as Tk50 lakh in the form of bribe paid to various people, to take control of a particular flight. Often they have had to spend Tk5 crore to ensure absolute control over the 11 flights that operate between Dhaka, Chittagong, Jeddah and Dubai, sources said.
The Dhaka Tribune has also learned that Captain Abu Mohammad Aslam Shaheed, detained yesterday, retired on October 10 but was yet to hand over his duties.
According to other sources, some of the Biman cabin crews, apparently those serving the smuggling racket, went into hiding after the officials were arrested yesterday.
In fact, it was the arrest of and the confessional statement given by one such cabin crew named Mazharul Afsar Rassel on November 12 that has led to yesterday’s arrests of the Biman big shots.
On that day, Rassel was nabbed by customs officials with gold bars weighing 2.6kg at the Shahjalal International Airport in the capital. The case was later handed over to the Detective Branch (BD) of Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP)
“Rassel confessed that these officials and some others were involved with the gang. They [the officials] were arrested from the airport, Uttara and Basundhara areas in the capital. We have also got the names of some other high-ranked officials,” DMP Joint Commissioner and DB chief Monirul Islam said at a press briefing yesterday.
The officials arrested yesterday were all shown arrested in the 2.6kg gold haul case.
Monir said the November 12 consignment had come from Dubai. “In Dubai, there is no restriction on buying big amount of goldbars or carrying those inside of the country. The Bangladeshi gold smugglers, after buying the gold bars, concentrate on smuggling those into Bangladesh. One Shafiul Azam control the syndicate there. He buys the gold bars,” Monir said.
“The Biman officials take care of carrying the bars in flights and bringing them out of the Dhaka airport. Palash used to coordinate the whole process and the negotiation among the Biman officials, employees and the smugglers. He has a lot of influential in Biman,” he said.
“The ‘negotiated money’ was then transferred through Harun’s money exchange firm Farhan Money Exchange,” said the DB boss.
“Biman flight captains, along with other officials concerned, were put in charge of making sure that the gold passed through the airport customs without hassle. For safe passage, the DGM and captain chose flight crew, attendants and other staffs. All of them were given separate assignments.
“In this particular case, the arrested officials are directly involved. Some other officials were also involved,” Monir explained.
According to the DB boss, the smugglers have three to four different ways for bringing the consignments in. Instead of using the Biman syndicate, which is very expensive, the smugglers sometimes use individual carriers.
“However, when they use the Biman network, they make a full-proof blue print about who will carry the gold as passenger, who will hide those in the aircraft and who will help it pass to the customs,” Monir said at the briefing.
According to the detectives, the most attractive sources of gold are Dubai, Jeddah, Riad, Dammam and Kuwait as Biman operates flights in all these places. Some officials from the scheduling, operation and training departments of Biman take from Tk20 lakh to Tk50 lakh as bribe for creating “favourable environments” for the smugglers in a flight by posting chosen employees on the flights.
The detectives have so far made a list of over 50 officials and crew members who are involved with the smuggling.
“Rassel admitted that since 2003, he had been on duty at over 200 flights. He went to Saudi Arabia, Italy, Germany, Singapore, Thailand and UAE and smuggled gold many times. The last time he went to Dubai on a BG-046 flight on November 10 and came back with a gold consignment and got caught in Shahjalal,” said a DB official seeking anonymity.
Meanwhile, the court of Dhaka Metropolitan Magistrate Mohammad Erfan Ullah awarded DB four days’ remand for each of the five people arrested yesterday.
According to sources, a total of 56 cases have been filed in connection with gold smuggling only this year, although the number of actual incidents is said to be a lot higher.
