Nine Kenyan women were arrested at the Mumbai international airport Wednesday for allegedly smuggling 18 kilograms of gold worth nearly Rs 10 crore from Nairobi, concealed in their luggage. According to sources in the Customs department, officials of the Air Intelligence Unit of Mumbai Customs department, while profiling the arrival of passengers, got suspicious of the movement of the women and took them for an inquiry. However, they did not cooperate with the questioning and officials noticed that they were trying to hide a bag. They seized the bag to search and found over 18 kilograms of gold inside it in melted form. The arrested women — Ardo Noor, Shukri Farah, Kero Jama, Habiba Omar, Ebla Abdulaahi, Anab Muhumed, Anisa Mubarak, Isnina Yusuf and Zainab Mohamud — have been arrested under the Customs Act. According to officials, the women associated with garment business, are aged between 26 and 47 years and were traveling to India on a tourist visa. Advocate Prabhakar Tripathi, representing the accused, said that the seized gold do not belong to the women. “They are wrongly framed in the case and the bag containing the gold does not belong to them. The smuggled consignment was not found in their personal posession. They have been sent to judicial custody,” Tripathi said. Further investigation is on to find the handlers of the accused women and to whom the gold was supposed to be delivered to in Mumbai. Earlier this week, the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) had busted an international gold smuggling racket and arrested 22 people, including 19 Sundanese nationals for smuggling 16 kilograms of gold worth nearly Rs 10 crore from UAE to India.
