LAHORE: The Special Federal Court of Customs Taxation and Anti-Smuggling has approved extension in judicial remand of the accused arrested by the customs authorities from Lahore on the charge of smuggling powder milk by showing it as plastic raw material.
An accused Zahid Rasheed was booked by the customs intelligence while he was trying to smuggle a huge quantity of powder milk of different brands. Customs intelligence, on a tip-off, intercepted a truck in the suburbs of Lahore city and found it loaded with international branded powder milk. After that, customs intelligence on the basis of investigation raided a warehouse and found a huge quantity of powder milk. Customs teams found 9349 bags of powder milk of different brands. Weight of the recovered powder was 232,000 kilo grams.
The value of the recovered powder milk is Rs70million. The smuggled milk is made of America, Turkey, Holland, Korea and India. All of the milk was smuggled from these countries from different routes, especially from Afghanistan.
A team of customs investigation presented accused Zahid Rasheed before the judge in the court of customs taxation and anti-smuggling and asked for remand of five days to complete investigation from the accused. After listening arguments from both sides, the customs court handed over the accused to investigation team for two days.
Again on Wednesday, he was produced before the court of Ch Aqal Hussain and investigation team asked for more two days which the court has approved.
After physical remand, he was sent to jail and now he is on judicial trial. Customs authorities have registered a case against him under Pakistan Customs Act-1969.