DRI seizes red sanders, gold, cigarettes: 9 held

In the first case, the DRI sleuths seized 7.968 kg of smuggled gold worth Rs 2.61 crore from two passengers at the Chennai Egmore railway station. The passengers had arrived from Kokrajahar in Assam and had smuggled the yellow metal across the Indo-Myanmar border at Moreh. The passengers had concealed the gold in specially made pockets stitched on to their jeans, a press release from the DRI said.

In another operation on May 2, foreign-branded cigarettes, prohibited for import and sale under the Customs Act and the cigarettes and other Tobacco products (Prohibition of Advertisement and Regulation of Trade and Commerce, Production, Supply and Distribution) Act, were found in an import container, declared to contain diapers at Chennai. More than 30 lakh cigarettes worth Rs 4.5 crore were found concealed in the container.

In the third case, DRI sleuths on April 29, seized two containers with about 14 metric tonnes of red sanders at Chennai Port and Krishnapatnam Port. These containers had endangered red sanders logs instead of the declared cargo of textile materials and food items.

In another incident, a team of DRI investigators, on Tuesday, intercepted a group of six passengers flying to Singapore from Chennai airport. When their check-in baggage was searched, 352 large mollusc shells weighing 180 kg were found.

With the assistance of officials from Wildlife Crime Control Bureau (Southern Region), the shells were identified as those of endangered marine species Turbo Marmoratus, listed in Schedule IV of the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972.

The smugglers admitted that they procured the shells from ecologically sensitive marine hotspots like the Gulf of Mannar and the seas around the Andaman Islands.