Gold bars in the toilet? That's what the cleaning crew found in a commercial plane toilet. The worker found 24 gold bars worth more than $1 million stuffed into a compartment in the toilet on a flight in eastern India.
India is one of the biggest gold consumers in the world, next to China. The country has seen an increase in smuggling after import taxes were raised by three times this year to try to shoot down the demand for the expensive metal, AFP reports.
The gold was found on a Jet Airways plane as it was being cleaned at Kolkata airport on Tuesday after it arrived from the eastern city of Patna. The plane had made some international trips before this route as well.
"The cleaning staff of the airport were going though their routine duties and found two bags in the toilets of the plane," director of the airport B.P. Mishra told AFP.
The bars, weighing one-kilogram, have not been claimed by anyone and no arrests have been made yet, Mishra said.
According to senior customs official R.S. Meena, the find is estimated to be about 70 million rupees, or $1.1 million.
This isn't the first time gold bars were found in the toilet of a plane. At the end of October, another cleaning crew found 280 gold bars worth more than $1 million in the toilet of a FlyDubai jet. The plane had landed in Dakha, Bangladesh after flying from Dubai. That wasn't the only case of gold smuggling in Dhaka. Over the past nine months, the city has seized more than 660 pounds of gold.
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
