32kg gold seized from Vande Bharat passengers in Jaipur

JAIPUR: In the largest seizure of gold in Rajasthan in the past nearly 20 years, customs sleuths on Friday seized 31.998kg of the yellow metal worth Rs 15.67 crore from 14 Indian passengers at the Jaipur airport and arrested all of them. These passengers had landed at Jaipur airport on two different Vande Bharat (VB) flights from UAE and Saudi Arabia. They had concealed the gold bars in the battery slots of emergency lights they were carrying.
The sleuths made the seizure after getting specific inputs about smuggling of gold by some passengers on the two flights meant to bring back Indians stranded in UAE and Saudi Arabia due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
“It was surprising for us as these flights were meant to bring back stranded Indians and smuggling in the times of Covid pandemic using VB flights is very strange,” said a senior customs officer on Saturday.
Customs officials first arrested three passengers, who came from Ras-Ul-Khema (UAE), and then held 11 passengers, who flew in from Riyadh (Saudi Arabia).
“The three passengers brought 12 gold bars weighing 9.339kg concealed in the emergency light battery slots, while the 11others brought in 22.659kg in a similar fashion,” the officer said.
He claimed that this is the biggest ever seizure of gold in the state in the last nearly 20 years. “In 2000, we had seized a bigger amount of gold from the India-Pakistan border in western Rajasthan,” the officer added.