BANGLADESH: The land ports of Bhomra and Benapole has been used greatly by smugglers for gold smuggling to India via Bangladesh, Bangladeshi Customs officials have also now been alert about the level of smuggling happening in the country, for which they have been keeping a strict eye at the gold mules (involving customs officials themselves), in comeback of which they have taken in custody plenty of gold.
The land ports in Bhomra and Benapole were used by smugglers to push the gold into neighboring country India. Although Bangladesh is no stranger to see gold being smuggled into the country, the frequency of it reached an alarming level this year; while for the first time ever, not only the gold mules, but also high-ranking aviation officials were directly linked to the smuggling racket.
The smugglers had never acted alone; over the years they had been in cahoots with unscrupulous officials involved with flight operations and management, who have consistently managed to escape the investigators’ radar.
But missing pieces of the puzzle started to fit in following the arrest of Biman cabin crew Mazharul Afsar Rassel on November 12 – who was caught at the Dhaka airport with 2.6kg of gold bars. During the interrogation, Rassel finally gave investigators a solid lead to chase by naming several top officials from Biman Bangladesh Airlines, Customs, and the Civil Aviation Authority of Bangladesh (CAAB).
Acting on the lead, police arrested Captain Abu Mohammad Aslam Shaheed, Biman’s chief of flight planning and scheduling; and Tozammel Hossain and Emdad Hossain, deputy general manager and manager of flight scheduling respectively.
Mahmudul Haque Palash, a listed contractor of Biman and reportedly a godson to the Biman chief, was also arrested for allegedly being a key man behind the gold smuggling racket. Biman Chairman Jamal Uddin Ahmed, however, denied any involvement with Palash.
The arrestees gave confessional statements where they mostly blamed each other. But they also reportedly revealed names of at least 56 bigwigs such as ministers, lawmakers, high-ranked government officials and influential businessmen – who had links to the gold smuggling business.
However, none of the named individuals have so far been arrested.
The arrested Biman employees also shed light on the intricate mechanism of smuggling gold in and out of the country, saying engineers of the airlines helped hide the products inside the inaccessible places of the fuselage.
Earlier in July this year, airlines engineers’ involvement also came to the fore when a huge consignment of gold was recovered in an abandoned condition from a Biman aircraft. Customs intelligence found that out of the 14 people involved with the assignment, 10 were members of the engineering department. Within a period of one year, the aircraft had been taken to the hanger nine times just to hide gold packages inside the interior fabric.
Meanwhile, after the arrest of the Biman high-ups in November, detectives submitted a report to the Prime Minister’s Office which said there were 30 gold smuggling syndicates active in several airports, who had help from 270 Biman and CAAB staff members and officials.
Twenty-three of the identified syndicates were in Bangladesh; 11 of them were involved directly with gold smuggling and the other 12 were operating in the guise of money exchange trading. Of the 11 syndicates directly involved, seven are at Dhaka airport, three at Chittagong airport and one is at Sylhet airport.
