Following a flight from Bangkok to eastern India’s Kolkata, cleaners discovered 24 gold bars worth $1.1 million in an airplane washroom. Officials at Jet Airways confirmed the incident Wednesday, according to the Associated Press.
After the airplane landed in Kolkata, workers had been cleaning the lavatory before a scheduled flight to Patna when the workers found two bags with the gold bars hidden inside. Each bar weighed about one kilogram.
Custom officials are now investigating the matter because it caused an initial bomb scare. “There was a bomb scare immediately when the bags were spotted in two separate toilets at round 1 a.m., but later we found they contained 12 pieces of gold bars in each,” a Customs official, Rameshwar Meena, told Reuters.
The Indian government has been warning consumers about gold smuggling, especially after it hiked its gold import duty recently. This has led to heightened gold smuggling. India remains one of the world’s largest consumers of the yellow metal.
In the Wednesday morning trading session, gold is down $10 and trading around the $1,260 mark.
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