CHENNAI: After a brief hiatus, Chennai Customs on Monday busted another gold smuggling racket involving Sri Lankan transit passengers and a contract staff of the Chennai International Airport leading to the seizure of 2.57 kg gold worth Rs 2.5 crore and the arrest of five persons.
The seizure comes after many smugglers started opting for other smuggling modes, following action against the aforesaid modus operandi in 2024, sources said.
In a release, Customs said that they mounted surveillance on the transit area of the airport in the intervening night of August 17 and 18. The team found two SL passengers, who landed at 2 am by an Indigo flight, to be suspicious based on their “weird” travel route of Dubai-Chennai-Singapore-Colombo with longer layovers at Chennai.
On Monday, a contract ground handling staff was found loitering near the washroom in the transit area, which incidentally had been used by one of the SL passengers. Customs team intercepted the staff and seized three black-taped, unusually heavy cylindrical balls.
On inquiry, the staff confessed that they were balls of gold paste, which were slipped to him by an SL passenger inside the washroom. Officers immediately rounded up three SL transit passengers and two of them admitted to concealing gold paste in their rectum and delivering it to the staff. Three cylindrical balls of gold were also seized after search, taking the total seizure to 2,576 gm of gold worth Rs 2.5 crore.
In a follow-up action, the investigators used the contract staff as bait and sent him outside the airport, which resulted in the arrest of two Indians, one of whom was a handler and another a receiver at different locations outside the airport.