Air Intelligence Unit of customs department seized gold weighing 170.7 grams from a passenger who arrived at the city airport on an Air Asia flight from Kuala Lumpur on Sunday night. The market value of the recovered gold is estimated at Rs 5.52 lakh.

Customs officials have detained the passenger, a native of Tamil Nadu, and is interrogating him.

“During search of his personal baggage and body, we recovered one piece of silver coated gold kada and two pieces of semi cylindrical gold bars wrapped with black adhesive tapes from his rectum,” said a press release of Customs department.

Before this incident, the Customs department on September 12 had seized gold weighing 690 grams from a passenger who arrived at the city airport on an Air Asia flight from Kuala Lumpur. The recovered gold was 99.90 per cent pure having a market value of Rs 21.89 lakh.

Gold is smuggled from Bangkok and well-organised rackets target carriers promising them hefty money. “Several methods are being adopted to conceal the metal including concealing the metal in body parts. Sometimes, metal is also smuggled through shoes and other luggages,” said a Customs official.

More than seven kilograms of gold have been recovered from passengers at the airport since the first direct international flight of Air Asia to Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur was launched in April last year.

Customs officials further said that the amount of duty free gold, which can be brought in by passengers, was low and it had to be in the form of ornaments. A woman passenger is allowed to bring 40 grams of gold not costing more than Rs 1 lakh while the amount is 20 grams in case of male, which should not cost more than Rs 50,000. However, this is only for those staying abroad for more than six months.