Bangladesh national arrested with 1.5 kg gold in Agartala

A Bangladesh national has been caught while trying to smuggle 1.5 kg gold into India.

This is the second incident of a Bangladeshi arrested on smuggling charges in Tripura in a month.

Last month, four Bangladesh nationals were detained by the Indian Border Security Force (BSF) along with $203,100 while they were crossing through the same check post.

They had brought the cash from Kolkata.

The latest arrestee has been identified as Md Liton Ahmad who hails from Comilla and entered Tripura on Monday through Srimantapur immigration check post, according to BSF.

In the afternoon he went to Agartala airport to fly to Kolkata.

SD Barman, director, Agartala Airport, said on duty CISF personnel during a search with metal indicator suspected some metallic object hidden in his shoes and asked Ahmed to open them.

He took off his shoes, brought out the gold biscuits wrapped in tapes inside the shoe heels and put them between two planks in the security hall to avoid detection.

Later as he passed the security scan and went inside the lobby to fly, he told the station manager of Indigo Airline that he needed to cancel his journey and return home as his grandfather had died. Accordingly, he was allowed to leave the airport.

However, CCTV camera footage showed that he had hidden something and a search revealed 15 gold biscuits of 100 gram each and a gold chain lying there and immediately an alert was raised. Security personnel started searching Ahmed who in the meantime had left the airport area.

The BSF caught Ahmad on Tuesday as he was trying to return home through the Srimantapur immigration check post and handed him over to Sonamura police.

During interrogation, Ahmed reportedly confessed that he had been working as a carrier of gold for a cross-border racket of smugglers. He was regularly using Tripura as a corridor to smuggle gold from Bangladesh to Kolkata and carry US dollars from there.