Two arrested with 1.23 kg gold paste worth Rs 75 lakh
In a major breakthrough, the CIA wing of the Ludhiana police busted an international gold smuggling racket and arrested two persons. The police recovered 1.23 kg of gold paste worth Rs 75 lakh and an illegal .32 bore pistol along with five live cartridges from the suspects.
The police have informed the Customs Department about the development and the gold paste would be handed over to them for further investigation. The Amritsar airport authorities are also being alerted. The suspects have been identified as Azad Singh (30), and Ashu Kumar (22), both residents of Amritsar.
Ludhiana Commissioner of Police (CP) Mandeep Singh Sidhu, DCP (Crime) Harmeet Hundal, ACP (Crime) Gurpreet Singh and CIA in-charge Inspector Beant Juneja addressed a press conference regarding the matter.
Sidhu said the CIA received a tip-off that Azad, Ashu, Parvinder Singh and Puneet, alias Guru, were involved in large-scale gold smuggling from Dubai to India. Parvinder, a native of Haridwar, now residing in Dubai, had been smuggling gold from Dubai to India.
Azad and Ashu had recently received a consignment of gold sent by Puneet from Dubai and they were on the way to deliver the same to their clients in Punjab. Accordingly, the police conducted a raid and nabbed the suspects near the Jalandhar bypass on Saturday. Initially, one kg of gold paste and a .32 bore pistol were seized from the duo. Later, the CIA team conducted a raid at the house of Azad in Amritsar from where 230 gm of gold paste was seized.
Puneet is the brother-in-law (sister’s husband) of Azad.
The CP said the police also seized a diary from the suspects in which several names of couriers, clients and other persons of the smuggling network were written. The police would verify all such details to dive deep into the international gold smuggling network.
CIA Inspector Beant Juneja, who busted the international gold smuggling network, while revealing the modus operandi said the gang had been smuggling gold from Dubai to India and in the past two months, it smuggled gold worth around Rs 30 crore in the paste form. Event detectors at the airport could not detect gold paste.
“Puneet used to send his courier man from Dubai along with the gold in paste form and he would send photograph of the courier person to Azad and Ashu along with the code. The duo then would go to the Amritsar airport to collect the same from the courier person by telling him the code. In lieu, they give Rs 20,000 or more for one delivery to the courier person. The gang had supplied around 50 consignments of gold from Dubai to India worth crores so far. About two days ago, they seized the consignment of 1.23-kg gold paste, sent by Puneet from Dubai,” he said.
Haridwar man smuggling gold from Dubai
CP Mandeep Singh Sidhu said the CIA received a tip-off that Azad, Ashu, Parvinder Singh and Puneet, alias Guru, were involved in large-scale gold smuggling from Dubai to India. Parvinder, a native of Haridwar, now residing in Dubai, had been smuggling gold from Dubai to India.
