Malappuram | A Keralite woman who tried to smuggle over one crore-worth gold from Saudi Arabia to her home state has been held outside the international airport here, police said on Wednesday.
The accused, 32-year-old Shabna, a native of Kunnamangalam in nearby Kozhikode district, was caught red-handed by Karipur police on Tuesday evening.
Based on a tip off, a police team stopped the woman who arrived here in a private air carrier from Jeddah, and interrogated her outside the airport, police sources said.
Though she was not ready to admit to the crime in the beginning, the gold, kept hidden in the innerwear in a mixture form, was recovered later during a body check, a senior police officer said.
"We had clear information regarding the smuggling. Based on that, we stopped and questioned her. She didn't admit to the crime in the beginning but revealed the details after the smuggled gold was recovered," he told PTI.
The officer said she had somehow managed to escape the customs check inside the airport.
"Sometimes it happens...as the metal was in the mixture form, it may not have been detected by the customs x-ray scanner. Not just this, the smuggling groups have several other methods to bypass the scanner equipment," he explained.
He also said the gold seized from the woman would be worth over Rs one crore in the market.
As it is a smuggling case, her arrest was not recorded by the police but the accused and the seized yellow metal would be submitted before a local court here soon, the officer added.
Several cases of gold smuggling attempts have been reported from the international airport here in recent times.
