Passenger with 13 kgs of gold held at Chennai airport

The arrested woman has been identified as Padma Amble Venkaataramaiah (52) from Chickamangalur in Karnataka.

As the Customs officials were checking passengers who had arrived from Dubai via an Air India flight, Amble, who was one of the passengers and had visited Dubai on a tourist visa, declared that she didn’t have any baggage and started proceeding through the green channel.

She was intercepted on suspicion that she might be carrying gold/contraband either in her baggage or on her person.

‘’As the passenger appeared to be nervous and was walking in a suspicious manner she was detained for questioning. As her responses were not satisfactory, a woman officer conducted a personal check on her and found that her Kurta was bulging around her waist,” a release from the office of Commissioner of Customs said. The search yielded 25 gold chains hidden in her clothes and around her hip. The gold weighed 13 kg.

Further search of the person resulted in the recovery of four gold bangles, two on each wrist, concealed under the sleeves of her Kurta, officials said.

She was arrested and since her passport revealed that she has been a frequent traveller to foreign countries, a probe is on to find whether she is part of an international smuggling racket. The seizures were made under the Customs Act, 1962 and the passenger was arrested.

This is the latest in a series of apprehensions from passengers coming from abroad by officials at the city airport in the recent past, including a case where two Chinese nationals were suspected of smuggling a whopping 40 kg of gold.

However, unlike the woman from Karnataka who was trying to smuggle the gold as jewels, the others were caught while attempting to evade the officials by concealing the precious metal - in buscuit and strip form - inside their baggage, wrapped around laptop charger and even inside hairclips.