Airport seizure: Customs dept nabs street vendor with 18 gold bars in Mohali

The Customs officials have arrested a street vendor, based in Khanna, and recovered 18 gold bars (bricks) weighing 1 kilogram each and valuing ₹ 10.28 crore, on his arrival from Dubai, at the Shaheed Bhagat Singh International Airport in Mohali, Customs officials said on Saturday.

Officials of the Ludhiana Customs Commissionerate raided the house of the street vendor in Khanna on Saturday. The raid was conducted at residence of the 30-year-old Suraj in Gurbaksh Colony in Khanna, where the officials questioned his wife and also seized some documents including his bank passbook.

Officials had arrested Suraj on the basis of intelligence inputs and recovered as many as 18 bars of pure gold of 1 kilogram each bearing marking “Etihad gold Dubai UAE’ having “995.0 purity”. The contraband gold was packed in a tiny hand bag, which the Khanna resident had stuffed into one of his checked-in bags after collecting them from the baggage belt.

All checked-in bags are scanned before putting them on the baggage belt. The baggage was found non-objectionable before being collected by Suraj who later put the gold into one of them. The gold was detected later in his hand bag.

The officials said he was a first-time traveller to Dubai and came under scanner from the list of suspects derived from Advanced Passenger Information System (APIS). He has been arrested under the Customs Act, 1962 and further investigations are underway, said a senior official.

At his residence during the raid, Suraj’s wife told the officials that her husband left for Dubai on February 22 and has not returned ever since. He works in transportation of vegetables on a motorised cart at the local vegetable mandi.