Three people including two Indian nationals were detained in separate hauls on Saturday with 11 gold bars weighing over six kilograms.
The customs authorities early Saturday detained two Indian siblings — Dinesh Kumar Jain and Suresh Kumar — aged around 40, with six gold bars weighing around 5.5 kilograms and foreign currency worth of around Tk 18 lakh at Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport in the capital.
A flight of Etihad Airways from Dubai carrying Dinesh and Suresh landed at the airport around 4:30am.
Because of their suspicious movement at the green channel of the airport, customs officials stopped them and searched them, said Kamrul Hasan, an assistant commissioner of customs.
Customs officials stopped Dinesh at first and later Suresh at the immigration zone of the airport.
After searching them, the official recovered five gold bars.
The officials also recovered 86,000 dirham (currency of United Arab Emirates) from their possession, Kamrul added.
The value of the gold bars is worth about Tk 2.5 crore, he added.
The customs officials suspected that they might be trying to hand over the bars to their clients in Bangladesh.
A case was filed with airport police station.
Earlier, another Indian national Dipak Kumar Acharya was detained with eight kilograms of smuggled gold bars on August 19.
Apart from the gold bars, police also recovered 11 iPhone mobiles and 11,225 memory cards from the 60-year-old.
Meanwhile, railway police in the morning detained a person and seized five gold bars in books from Chittagong railway station area.
The bars were seized from the books he was carrying.
The detained was identified as Shafiqur Rahman from Satkania in Chittagong.
Officer-in-charge of Chittagong railway police station said acting on a tip-off police searched Shafique and recovered the gold bars while he denied his involvement in trafficking gold saying he was just a carrier.
A case was underway in this regard with railway police station concerned.
-With New Age input
