Agartala, March 3: In a major breakthrough in busting an international smuggling racket, police recovered an antique gold idol of Lord Buddha weighing more than 900 grams from the Bisramganj area in West Tripura’s Bishalgarh subdivision last night.
The police arrested three persons, including a man and his son who were travelling with the idol in a Maruti van, in connection with the crime.
Police sources said around 10.45 pm, officer in-charge of Bisramganj police outpost Narayan Saha received an anonymous phone call informing him that a smuggled idol was being transported from Sonamura town to Bishalgarh. The caller even provided the police with the number of the vehicle.
Saha immediately alerted the Bishalgarh police and deployed personnel at checkpoints on the Sonamura-Bishalgarh road. Within 15 minutes, the van reached the Bisramganj checkpoint and was intercepted by the police.
The father-and-son duo, identified as Shahid Mia and Hero Mia, who runs a jewellery shop in Bishalgarh town, was arrested. After a thorough search of the vehicle, the Buddha idol, worth several lakhs of rupees in the antique black market, was recovered.
Sources said Shahid Mia confessed during interrogation that he had purchased the idol for Rs 1.25 lakh from two smugglers — Ershad Mia and Taher Mia of Durganagar village in Sonamura subdivision.
The police later arrested Ershad Mia from Durganagar in Sonamura but Taher Mia is said to have fled to Bangladesh.
Shahid Mia also informed the police that the idol had been sent to Sonamura from Sabroom subdivision on the Indo-Bangladesh border. Police suspect that an organised gang of smugglers had stolen the image from a Buddhist monastery in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh.
The recovery follows close on the heels of a series of robberies of antiques. Three antiques were recently stolen from the state museum in the heart of this town, while a gold idol of Buddha was stolen from a Buddhist monastery in the Mahamuni area under South Tripura’s Sabroom subdivision. The antiques have not yet been recovered. Several stone images have also been smuggled out of the state from the Pilak archaeological site in South Tripura.