Siliguri, 12th February: Siliguri’s DRI team has seized gold worth Rs 10 crore from Kanchenjunga train by conducting an operation. Four people have also been arrested in the said case. The accused have been identified as Nirmalendu Paul (51), Sujon Paul (31), Pijush Poddar (46) and Sujit Das (45), all said to be residents of Karimganj in Assam.
Reportedly, the four accused boarded the Kanchenjunga train from Karimganj railway station in Assam to go to Kolkata. Based on tip-off, the DRI conducted an operation in the Kanchenjunga train while running a campaign at the NJP railway station. During this, four people were searched based on suspicion. After this, 10 pieces of gold bars were retrieved from inside the waistband of the people. The said four were arrested for not failing to provide valid gold documents. Today all the accused have been produced in the Siliguri court during which the judge has directed to keep the four accused in judicial custody for a day.
In this regard, DRI’s lawyer Ratan Banik said that the four accused first brought the bar of foreign gold to Assam from the Indo-Myanmar border via Bangladesh. The gold was then melted to remove the mark. After this, the smuggler tried to smuggle the said gold into Kolkata by hiding it in a special waist belt. But before that, the accused were arrested. The total weight of gold is around 18 kilos of its market value has been estimated at around Rs 10 crore 60 lakhs. On the other hand, defence counsel Akhil Vishwas said that all four of his clients were taking old gold ornaments to Kolkata to get them made into new designs. But the DRI arrested his client in a false case.