Officials of the Customs Air Intelligence Unit at the Cochin International Airport here on Sunday foiled an ingenious attempt to smuggle in gold and seized 2 kgs of the precious metal worth Rs. 66 lakh, kept inside a flight from Dubai.
According to officials, the step followed a specific intelligence input they got about the smuggling. Soon after all passengers disembarked, Customs officials started rummaging through the Spice Jet aircraft that had landed here at 2.10 a.m., during which they found the metal kept concealed under a seat. As there was no claimant, the authorities seized it.
“The contraband, in the form of a gold chain, gold bangles and cut pieces of gold bars, was found concealed in a plastic packet’’, said a top Customs official. Explaining the modus operandi of the smugglers, he said one person had brought the gold from Dubai to Kochi and kept it under the cushion cover of a seat. The location of the seat would be then passed on to another person who was scheduled to take the same flight during its next leg to Chennai and remove the gold from under the seat.
Domestic flights usually do not have any checking and the racket was attempting to capitalise on this loophole, he said.
