Gold smuggling up by 5-fold at IGI airport

New Delhi: Gold smuggling operations at IGI airport are getting bigger and smarter. The quantity of the metal being recovered from suspects leaving the Terminal-3 has gone up by 550% over the last one fiscal.
Officials say it is not only the undercover gold trade that is picking up, but the operators are also becoming better at hiding their trails, forcing law enforcers to exercise greater alertness and intelligence in order to catch them.
"What we have been seeing for the past few months is a dramatic changing of the profiles of the couriers. A few months ago, smugglers of a particular ethnicity carried gold. Then it was a middle class man from another region. The handlers changed the profile of the courier to women and the latest case was of a lower middle class person from UP," said an official on condition of anonymity.
The official said no one can predict what tactic the smugglers will now employ. "It's not one-way vigilance. Smugglers also profile us. They watch us examining people of a certain background and quickly change their modus operandi," another official said.
Read News In full 21/09/13 Saurabh Sinha/Times of Ind