Man held on return from Oman
A man was arrested with 146 gold bars weighing 17 kilograms at Shah Amanat International Airport in Chittagong yesterday morning.
The arrestee, Mir Mohammad Shahnewaz Morshed, had started for Dhaka from the Omani capital Muscat on a flight of United Airways that landed at the airport at 9:30am.
The plane stopped at Chittagong en route to Dhaka, and Morshed was the only passenger headed that way, said Sushanta Pal, assistant commissioner of airport customs.
The airline’s crew handed him over to customs officials due to his suspicious behaviour on board the plane, he said.
The arrestee was drunk when the customs officials found the gold bars after searching a plastic bag he was carrying. They also seized around 400 grams of gold ornaments from him.
The gold bars, each weighing about 11 grams, were found wrapped with Scotch tape and hidden inside four rolls of cloth in the bag.
A resident of Boalkhali upazila in Chittagong, Morshed told reporters that he worked as a driver in Dubai and that it was his first time smuggling gold.
He told police and customs officials that he did not own the gold, was just a carrier and was going to hand it over to someone in Dhaka, said Md Moyeen Uddin, assistant commissioner of Immigration Police.
-With The Daily Star input
