Panaji: Gold bars cut-to-size and masquerading as cellphone batteries, ball-point pen refills made of solid gold, tiny cubes of bullion hidden inside a wrist watch, and nearly a kilo of the precious metal flattened out into wafer-thin foil and concealed between layers of worthless packaging cardboard-sleuths from the Goa customs have seen all this and more, in the past 45 days.
Since January 2014, the customs commissionerate has seized 5.5kg of smuggled gold, valued at 1.39 crore at Goa's Dabolim airport.
"The smugglers have become more brazen and ingenious in their modus operandi, but all the men we have intercepted are merely "couriers", who had been promised small sums of money to carry the gold. They are mostly poor labourers in Dubai or Sharjah, and a majority of them are from the southern states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu," said customs commissioner V P C Rao.
15/02/14 Times of India
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Since January 2014, the customs commissionerate has seized 5.5kg of smuggled gold, valued at 1.39 crore at Goa's Dabolim airport.
"The smugglers have become more brazen and ingenious in their modus operandi, but all the men we have intercepted are merely "couriers", who had been promised small sums of money to carry the gold. They are mostly poor labourers in Dubai or Sharjah, and a majority of them are from the southern states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu," said customs commissioner V P C Rao.
15/02/14 Times of India
