Airport staff, cops held for helping gold smugglers

CHENNAI: Directorate of revenue intelligence (DRI) officials detained two constables of the Tamil Nadu special police and a ground staff member of the airport for helping passengers evade checks and smuggle gold out of the airport.
Gold biscuits weighing 4.1kg brought from Singapore and 4.6kg from Bahrain worth approximately 2.5crore were seized from two passengers in two cases on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.
The special police constables who were on duty at the immigration department at the airport took 4.1kg gold biscuits from Sadique Ali who arrived from Singapore on Tuesday 10pm and were planning to hide it in their cloakroom. The passenger handed over the gold to the police constables before proceeding for immigration check.
The DRI officials, who had prior information, confronted one of the constables and seized the gold. He informed them about his accomplice.
Officials are now probing whether the constables were involved with gold smugglers earlier as well.
In another case, 4.6kg gold was seized by DRI sleuths when a passenger, who arrived from Bahrain, was handing it over to a ground crew member of a private firm involved in ground handling at the airport on Wednesday.
The employee was supposed to bring the gold out of the airport and hand it over to the passenger.
Officials are also checking security camera footage at the terminals to find out if such a incidents occurred earlier. DRI sleuths have been receiving information about the new modus operandi adopted by smugglers, in police constables working on deputation at the airport. This is the second time police constables deputed to the airport were found to be involved in gold smuggling.
A few weeks ago, a police constable was detained after he was found accepting the gold from a passenger and was transferred from the airport after an inquiry.
Last Thursday customs officials arrested seven women at the city airport for smuggling 3.3kg of gold worth close to 90 lakh into the country.
Air customs have also increased surveillance on passengers arriving by flights from the Middle East, Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia.
There has been a major increase in the number of seizures in the past 18 months, and officials attribute the spike to successive hikes in import duty on gold since 2013 and a huge gap between demand and supply.
Customs and police have seized in excess of 200kg of gold from smugglers in the state in a year. Enforcement officials in Tamil Nadu seized gold worth 13 crore from smugglers in 2013. They have seized gold worth more than 45 crore so far this year.