A flyer from the Maldives has been caught at Kempegowda International Airport with over half a kilo of gold paste concealed in his rectum, customs officials said.
The passenger landed in Bengaluru on Go First's G8-44 flight on December 30, 2022. His travel pattern and awkward gait piqued customs officials' interest. They frisked him and put him through a full-body scanner, which can detect gold concealed inside the body. That's when the presence of three cubes of gold paste in his rectum was revealed. Customs officials eventually extracted a gold bar weighing 532.21 grams worth Rs 28.72 lakh from the gold paste.
In a separate case, customs officials intercepted a passenger who arrived from Dubai on Emirates Airlines' EK-564 flight on December 29. He was also put through a full-body scanner, which revealed gold paste stashed in his underwear. The gold paste yielded a 210.35-gram gold bar worth Rs 11.18 lakh.
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Gold paste has become one of the easiest ways of smuggling gold. Pure gold is melted at high temperatures and impurities are added to it. The solution is dyed and made into a paste. To extract the gold, the paste is converted into powder and washed with chemicals.
Customs officials in Karnataka seized 90.224 kg of gold and registered 130 cases in 2022 (until November), Union Minister of State for Finance Pankaj Chaudhary told the Lok Sabha on December 12.
In December, customs officials at Bengaluru and Mangaluru airports seized another four kilos of gold and registered at least six more cases. More than 3.5 kg of gold was seized at the Bengaluru airport alone in five separate cases. The means of smuggling in all these cases was gold paste.
In all, nearly 95 kg of gold has been seized from suspected smugglers at the two international airports in the state this year. This is the highest in four years. The quantity of smuggled gold seized in Karnataka was 91.75 kg in 2021, 52.6 kg in 2020 and 89 kg in 2019.
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