It is suspected that a passenger who had travelled from Muscat would have carried the gold biscuits and hid th... Read More

BENGALURU: Fifty-seven gold biscuits weighing 6.6kg and valued at over Rs 2 crore were found hidden inside the rear lavatory of an Air India flight that landed at Kempegowda International Airport (KIA) from Muscat on Thursday. A Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) team that combed the aircraft following a tip-off found the gold stash after a four-hour search.

DRI sources said the gold biscuits were in a pouch, which was found dangling near the commode. It was placed in such a way that it’d be difficult to spot. “We had specific information on gold smuggling and got into the Air India Muscat-Mumbai-Bengaluru flight that landed in Bengaluru on Thursday morning. We searched the entire flight bit by bit,” said a DRI officer.

The team spotted something unusual about the fitting of the commode in one of the lavatories and dismantled it to unearth a large plastic pouch containing the gold.

It is suspected that a passenger who had travelled from Muscat would have carried the gold biscuits and hid them during the overnight journey. The biscuits were possibly meant for a domestic passenger from Mumbai to Bengaluru, who would have later handed them over to local smugglers waiting outside Bengaluru airport, or an airport employee might have been assigned the job of collecting the smuggled gold, suspects DRI.

Thorough probe is under way and the passengers’ list is being scanned to ascertain the source of the smuggled gold and if any airport insider is involved.

