Gold smuggling racket thriving for eight months busted, four arrested

Surat: The special operation group (SOG) busted a gold smuggling racket and arrested four people including a husband-wife duo who had illegally brought 927 grams of gold worth Rs. 65 lakh from Dubai at the Surat airport.
In a midnight operation, the SOG sleuths picked up the couple, Naeem Saleh (29) and his wife Umaima (25) outside a hotel in the Jahangirpura area, and caught two people who had come to receive the gold.The couple landed at the international airport from Dubai in the early hours of Sunday.
The cops had a tough time finding the gold from the four bags as the yellow metal was concealed in the rubber sheet which was sprayed with a chemical that cannot be caught in airport scanners. This is the first time that the cops have stumbled upon such a gold smuggling modus operandi.
The Saleh couple is a resident of Mosali village of Surat district’s Mangrol taluka. “Both were sent to Dubai by Mosali resident Maulana Abdul Bemat (33) who handled the smuggling operations from Surat and coordinated with a Dubai gang. Bemat had come with Firoz Nur (48), is resident of Vasaravi village in Mangrol, to receive the gold.
They had smuggled gold by mixing it with chemicals and spraying it on the rexine and rubber sheets of four trolley bags.
SOG police inspector AP Chaudhary got a tip-off that a couple carrying gold would land in Surat on July 7 on a Dubai flight. After landing at Surat airport and successfully clearing the customs and immigration check, the couple headed for a hotel at 2.45am on July 7. Outside the hotel, they handed over the four bags to Bemat and Nur. SOG police swooped on them and caught all four for further investigation.
They were booked under relevant sections of the Bharatiya Nyay Sanhita (BNS) for cheating, forgery and criminal conspiracy.