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Seems likely somebody in Asia has the smuggler’s blues today. On Monday, authorities in Bangladesh found and seized 106 gold bars hidden inside the bathroom of an airplane that had just landed from the United Arab Emirates.
The 106 bars, which were seized at Shahjalal International Airport in Dhaka, Bangladesh, weighed in at 12 kilograms (around 26.5 pounds)—which, at the current value of gold, are worth approximately $500,000.
“The gold bars were wrapped up with tape on the back of a mirror in the plane’s toilet,” Customs Department deputy commissioner Othello Chowdhury said, according to Bangledeshi news outlet bdnews24.com.
Based on an analysis of data from Flight Aware, the aircraft in question appears to have been Bangladesh Berman Airlines Flight 128, a Boeing 777-300. The flight departed Abu Dhabi at 12:55am local time, landing in Chittagong, Bangladesh for a brief stopover at 7:47am local time before taking back off at 8:49am for the 170-mile hop to Dhaka. (In case you were thinking, “Whoa, that’s a really short flight for a Boeing 777,” you’d be right—but considering Chittagong has a population of more than 2.5 million and Dhaka’s population numbers more than 14.4 million, using a 365-seat airliner for hops between cities starts to make more sense.)
Chowdhury said the gold had been recovered by customs officials with the help of members of Bangladesh’s National Security Intelligence service. No arrests had been made as of this morning, the customs official stated, but authorities have commenced a search for whomever the curious person or persons using the john of a widebody Boeing as a stash box might be.
