Youth hiding gold in body held in Kovai

Based on a specific tip off about the smuggling of gold, DRI officials nabbed Saravanan at the Coimbatore International Airport when the Air Arabia flight in which he had travelled landed at Coimbatore around 4 am on Monday. Customs personnel said that the DRI sleuths had taken him under their custody even before he reached the scanners. 

Caught red-handed, Saravanan confessed to the crime. He revealed that he was only a carrier for money. The sleuths said that as the youth was unemployed he had always done odd jobs for a living. He was promised a handsome amount for bringing the gold from Sharjah. He had accepted the assignment and had left abroad a few days ago. During the inquiry, he voluntarily took out the ingots in an enclosure at the airport. 

“There were 10 ingots, each weighing 116 grams. We searched for his accomplices who were supposed to pick him up from the airport but they escaped suspecting that there was something amiss,” a DRI official told DTNext. He added that Saravanan was booked under the sections of the Customs Act.

He will be quizzed to know the final destination for the smuggled gold and also about who had engaged him for the job. DRI and Customs officials said that this is the fourth instance, in less than a year, gold ingots have been seized from passengers at the Coimbatore International Airport. All of them had managed to conceal the precious metal in their rectum. 

The most recent incident was in the second week of March this year when 1.166 kg of gold was recovered from a passenger. In the fourth week of November, 2016, 700 grams of gold was recovered from a passenger. In the first week of August, 2016, 930 grams was recovered from a passenger. A DRI official said that a person can keep gold concealed in his rectum for 6-14 hours based on the individual’s capacity.