GUWAHATI: The government railway police in Guwahati on Friday seized 20 kg of gold worth Rs six crore, from four persons travelling by an express train to Delhi.
The accused, all from Mizoram’s capital Aizawl, were travelling by the Tripura Sundari and had boarded from Tripura’s capital Agartala on Thursday afternoon.
This is the second major gold haul in the Northeast in recent times. Two years ago, 37 kg of gold was seized from a passenger at the Lokopriya Gopinath Bordoloi International Airport in Guwahati.
“The gold was seized during routine frisking of trains. There were 12 gold bars weighing 20 kg,” Pankaj Kalita, officer-in-charge of Guwahati railway station, told the New Indian Express.
He said the accused would be handed over to the customs department along with the seized gold after interrogation.
Guwahati has turned out to be a transit route for smuggled gold, often in the form of carat biscuits. It is smuggled from Myanmar to Mizoram and finds its way into various parts of India, via Guwahati.
The police got a whiff of the gold smuggling racket in 2016, following the arrest of kingpin Narendra Jain and his associate Sartaz in New Delhi.
Jain had disclosed that his associates had smuggled around 7,000 kg gold worth Rs 2,000 crore from Guwahati since 2014.