MALAPPURAM
The police in the district have gone the extra mile by laying their hands on the gold smuggling rackets operating through the Calicut International Airport at Karipur.
For the first time in the 34-year history of the Karipur airport, the police under the direct supervision of District Police Chief Sujit Das S. made a series of seizures of gold compounds smuggled in by the passengers at Karipur.
As many as 15 seizures were made by the police since February. In the latest case, the police seized 2.67 kg of gold from three passengers who arrived at Karipur on Friday. The police seizures are apart from the gold and hawala seizures frequently made by the Enforcement Directorate and the Customs.
“It is the first time in our history that the police are directly involved in the seizure of gold being smuggled in through our airports. So far, we never had any direct detection,” said Mr. Sujit Das.
Mr. Das said that his team turned to gold seizure as part of addressing the increased dacoities in Malappuram and neighbouring districts. “A close examination of the dacoity cases that took place in Malappuram in the last 10 years revealed that all of them belonged to either gold or hawala category.”
As there was a spurt in gold-based dacoity cases in recent times, the police adopted a new strategy of cutting off the sources. “We found that cutting off the sources would be an effective means to prevent dacoities taking place on our highways,” said Mr. Das.
Police found from experience that controlling hawala movements was too tough. So was the illicit movement of gold, particularly from the Gulf countries. “What we can do is to increase detections. And thus, we can considerably reduce the number of crimes, including dacoity,” he said.
Mr. Das and his team strengthened their intelligence network to lay their hands on the smugglers of Malabar. All the cases had evaded the Customs detection at Karipur. Unlike the Customs and ED seizures, the police could nab not only the carriers, but their receivers as well.
“Because we are operating from outside the airport, we could easily lay our hands on the people who come to receive the smuggled in gold,” said a senior intelligence officer.
In most cases detected by the police, the carriers were found to have hidden the gold capsules in their body. And for most carriers, their rectum was the hiding place.
