When a routine flight from Colombo landed at Chennai International Airport late Monday, two gentlemen caught the attention of the Customs officers because of the shape of their faces. They claimed to observed maun vrata, but when custom officials forced them to open their mouth and lift their tongues, they found hidden nearly 450 gm of gold shaped to fit between the lounge and lower palate.
Customs officers are extra cautious nowadays because of the rampant gold smuggling in the Colombo-Chennai route. A gram of gold is cheaper by more than `500 in Colombo and smugglers will not waste an option to “bring in” some quantity of the precious metal.
The two gentlemen who arrived by the Colombo flight caught the attention of the Customs officers because of the shape of their faces. One of the young officers found that their faces differed slightly from the photographs given in the passports. To clear the doubt, the officer asked them their names and personal details. Both the passengers tried to answer in monosyllables which caused further suspicion in the mind of the officer. He asked his colleague to join him and grilled Shahul Hameed and Mohammed Izadeen, the two gentlemen from Colombo.
Hameed and Izadeen tried to convince the officials that they were on maun vrata (vow of silence), usually practised by Hindu and Jain monks.
The officers had read that that even Anna Hazare observed maun vrata when he was tormented by Arvind Kejriwal. But the officers smelled something fishy in the maun vrata of Hameed and Izadeen. The duo opened their mouth when we asked them to do so but they did not lift their tongues. So we had to use some pressure to make them open the mouth and lift the tongues out,” said one of the officials.
The customs officials were bowled over by what they saw inside their mouths. Gold weighing 456.83 grams had been shaped to fit between the lounge and lower palate that was smuggled into India by the duo hoodwinking the customs officials in Colombo.
“The gold seized from them is valued at `13.6 lakh. They could cheat the customs officials because the detectors scan only the body and not the face,” said another official.
Hameed and Izadeen are being interrogated by the officials of the revenue intelligence and customs department. For the Customs officials in Chennai, this was a new experience.
“We have come across many ingenious ways employed by the smugglers to bring in gold. But this is the first time we are coming across an instance in which the contraband has been reshaped to fit it inside their body,” said the official.
In the past , the big time smuggling syndicates had used “out-of-the-box” methods like sewing gold lined with graphite into coats and women who bring gold biscuits inside their hair buns.
“We have seized 4 kg gold from a woman who had artistically hidden it inside her brassiere,” said another official.
It is not known how many “gentlemen” might have brought in gold and precious stones under the pretext of maun vrata... Some years ago, Customs officials in Kochi had seized gold from persons coming back from west Asia.
“The gold was stored in their rectum and we could make it out because of their distinct style of walking,” said a veteran Customs official.