DHAKA: Over the last few years, Bangladesh is being used as a transit for smuggling counterfeit Indian currencies. Syndicates based in a number of countries, especially Pakistan, have been doing this, intelligence agencies have said.
To find out more about this and ways to tackle the smuggling, a team from an Indian state intelligence agency has come to Bangladesh.
The Indian National Intelligence Agency (NIA) team, led by their inspector general, will hold meetings of the joint task-force at the police headquarters in Dhaka today and tomorrow, says a document of Bangladesh Police signed by Mokhlesur Rahman, an additional inspector general of police.
Seeking anonymity, an official of Bangladesh Police’s Criminal Investigation Department (CID) told media that 151 cases have been filed here since 2009 in connection with smuggling of fake rupees.
Most of the fake currencies were smuggled into Bangladesh from Pakistan, Dubai, Thailand and Malaysia, the high-ranked CID official said.
Customs officials said several consignments of fake Indian rupees have been caught in recent times at the Dhaka and Chittagong airports.
In February, a Pakistani diplomat was withdrawn from Dhaka after local intelligence dug out his involvement with terror financing and currency forgery.
The diplomat, Mohammad Mazhar Khan, attaché at the consular section of the Pakistan High Commission in Dhaka, was also an agent of his country’s secret service ISI, Bangladesh’s Foreign Ministry officials said at that time.
He had allegedly set up a wide network of manufacturing and distributing fake Indian currency.
In the last week of April, customs officials seized a consignment with a face value of Rs600 crore. The massive consignment of rupees, packed in a big carton, was seized from the cargo lounge of the Dhaka airport.
Two weeks before that, a Bangladeshi national named Mohammad Sajjad Hossain was arrested at the Dhaka airport along with fake Indian bills with a Rs2.5-crore face value.
He was arrested when he arrived on a flight from Qatar’s Doha. Further probe found that he had travelled from Karachi to Doha and boarded the flight to Dhaka after a three-hour stopover.
Sajjad was a frequent visitor to Pakistan and he had visited Karachi a few days after getting a new passport. The probe also showed that the Pakistan High Commission had issued him visa a number of times.
CID officials said that the syndicates smuggle in the fake currencies and send them to the areas near the Indian border.
The use of Bangladesh as a transit for gold smuggling into India has also risen in recent years after India raised the duty on the import of gold ornaments.
