Cigarette smuggling racket busted; 21 passengers detained at Kerala's Karipur airport

In a joint operation, sleuths from the CBI, Customs and Department of Revenue Intelligence on Tuesday seized a huge volume of foreign brand cigarettes while it was being smuggled into the country from the Gulf and detained around 21 passengers at Karipur airport in Kozhikode, sources said.

Officials have also detained a batch of officials from the customs and other departments on the suspicion that they had links with the cigarette smugglers, they said.

Sources said the cigarettes' being smuggled can easily be detected in scanning but such checking and recovery were not carried out effectively.

The less number of seizures from the side of officials generated a suspicion about their involvement and based on intelligence inputs, a joint operation was launched to bust the syndicate.

Although the operation was aimed at the cigarette smuggling racket, the officials also investigated the gold smuggling through the airport, they said.

The central agencies' joint operation is still on and the seizure list will be finalised later in the night, the sources added.