The investigative committee has discovered that the Tribhuvan International Airport has neglected to give investigators CCTV evidence from more than three weeks prior to the suspected smuggling incident in the ongoing investigation into the 14 kg gold smuggling case.
According to the Home Ministry’s 2015 CCTV/Camera Installation and Operation Procedure, CCTV footage is to be preserved for a minimum of three months.
Chandra Ghale, a resident of Barpak, Gorkha, was detained at the airport on December 7 after arriving in Kathmandu on a flydubai trip and bringing with her 14 kg of gold. He had on a garment that resembled a waistcoat and hidden the gold bars within.
“Our objective was to obtain the CCTV footage from the three months preceding the confiscation of the 14 kg of illicit gold in the beginning of December,” stated Maniram Poudel, the chairman of the inquiry panel, which presented its findings to TIA customs chief Tok Raj Pandey on Sunday. “The CCTV footage that we were provided only dates back 21 days; it was purported that older recordings were automatically deleted.”
According to regulations implemented in 2015, the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal (CAAN) was required to preserve the CCTV footage; however, it lacked a mechanism for preserving footage for such an extended duration.
“Up until November 1, we had a system of retaining up to a month’s worth of footage,” stated Tribhuvan International Airport CAAN spokeswoman Subhas Jha. “Therefore, we were unable to furnish CCTV footage spanning extended durations.”
However, he claimed that the CCTV footage may be stored for three months thanks to a system that the TIA built in early November.
“We didn’t think it was necessary to preserve CCTV recordings for a long time in the past.” Purchasing and installing a system to store footage for three months also took time. Jha Said.
Even the CCTV footage that is currently available could be vital in proving that the same gang was involved in smuggling more gold, even if the probe committee was unable to obtain footage from more than three weeks before the smuggled gold was discovered.
During his questioning, Chandra Ghale, who was detained on December 7 with 14 kg of gold, claimed that he was merely a courier and that he had been instructed to deposit the valuables in the dustbin located in the airport’s washroom. After then, the haul was meant to be transported to a preset location by the sanitation personnel.
Poudel stated, “Shrestha told us that he had brought gold himself seven times, 14 kg at a time.” According to Poudel, the investigation committee deduced that this group had smuggled 138 kg of gold in 2022 and 2023 based on the statements made by individuals who were arrested.
The investigative committee said that the gang had smuggled gold in cooperation with Lekh Bahadur Tamang and Ramesh Deula, two CAAN employees at the TIA. However, due to a lack of time, the committee was unable to determine the final destination of the gold that was smuggled.
Poudel claims that Min Bahadur Ghale informed the investigation committee that they had previously given illegal gold to the individuals designated by Ankit Agrawal, an Indian resident living in Dubai. He claimed, however, that “he [Ghale] didn’t confirm whether the gold was destined for India.”
Numerous more instances of gold smuggling through the TIA in recent years suggest that the nation’s international airport has developed into a hub for the transportation of yellow metal.
60 kg of illegal gold was discovered in July by the Department of Revenue Investigation (DRI) in Sinamangal, Kathmandu, shortly after it sneaked past customs officials at Tribhuvan International Airport (TIA).
Afterwards, the Central Investigation Bureau of Police was given the case. Transnational and political ties were found during the inquiry; several Chinese nationals were operating gold smuggling operations with what appeared to be the support of prominent Nepalese politicians.
Police discovered that former Speaker Krishna Bahadur Mahara, who is also the vice-chair of the CPN (Maoist Centre), had several interactions with Daojin Wang, a Chinese national who has been charged in a separate case involving the smuggling of 9 kg of gold. But according to TIA customs official Pandey, “no Chinese link has been established thus far in the 14-kg gold smuggling case.”
The customs office there does not have an X-ray machine that can identify gold buried in other metals, according to an investigation into the smuggling of 60 kg of gold. The smuggling of 14 kg of gold revealed that, despite the airport being one of the most sensitive locations, the TIA was not maintaining video of people’s movements for longer than a month.
“We will now have the infrastructure to store CCTV footage for up to three months,” Jha declared.
