The Directorate of Revenue Intelligence busted a major organised gold smuggling syndicate at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport in Mumbai, seizing 29.37 kilograms of gold valued at Rs 37.74 crore and arresting 24 foreign nationals in an operation codenamed Dhahabu Blitz, the agency disclosed on Friday.
Acting on specific intelligence, DRI officers identified a group of female carriers arriving from Nairobi and intercepted all 24 of them in a swift and coordinated enforcement action. The recovered gold comprised 25.10 kilograms of gold bars and 4.27 kilograms of gold jewellery, concealed across the passengers in what investigators described as a highly organised operation using trained carriers and coordinated evasion methods designed to defeat standard detection protocols at the airport.
The operation’s name offers a clue to its origins — Dhahabu is the Swahili word for gold, pointing to the East African dimension of the smuggling network that DRI had been tracking before the interception. The Nairobi route has been a known corridor for gold smuggling into India, exploiting the commercial air connectivity between East Africa and Mumbai and the relatively lower scrutiny that passenger-borne jewellery and personal effects receive compared to cargo consignments. The use of multiple female carriers travelling together on the same flight, each carrying a portion of the total consignment, is a classic syndicate technique designed to keep individual quantities below the threshold that would trigger immediate seizure while aggregating to a significant total volume across the group.
The seizure of 29.37 kilograms across 24 carriers means each passenger was on average carrying just over 1.2 kilograms of gold — a quantity that, while individually below the more dramatic thresholds associated with single-carrier cases, adds up to one of the larger single-operation gold seizures at a Mumbai airport in recent months when consolidated. The split between gold bars and jewellery is also significant — bars indicate a financially sophisticated operation moving raw material for eventual sale or melting, while jewellery suggests a parallel attempt to pass some of the consignment off as personal effects.
Gold smuggling into India has a structural economic driver that enforcement alone cannot eliminate — the gap between international gold prices and domestic prices created by India’s import duty on gold, which makes bringing gold into the country through unofficial channels financially rewarding for organised networks. With gold prices elevated through 2025 and 2026, partly as a result of the geopolitical uncertainty created by the Iran war and the Strait of Hormuz disruption, the profit motive for smuggling syndicates has only increased. MCX gold was trading at Rs 1,51,049 per ten grams as of April 9, reflecting the sustained safe-haven premium that conflict conditions generate.
DRI stated that the case reveals the sophistication of the syndicate’s operational model — trained carriers, coordinated travel, and evasion methods that required specific intelligence to defeat rather than standard screening. The agency said it remains committed to dismantling gold smuggling networks that undermine India’s economic and fiscal systems and threaten national interests, a reference to the dual harm that large-scale gold smuggling causes — direct revenue loss to the exchequer through avoided import duties and broader macroeconomic pressure through unrecorded capital flows that bypass the formal financial system.
All 24 foreign nationals have been arrested. Investigations are ongoing.
Disclaimer: This article is based on official DRI communications and publicly available information. Legal proceedings are ongoing and individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty by a competent court. Business Upturn is not responsible for any decisions made based on this article.