Chennai: Chennai airport customs officials on Thursday seized Rs 65 crore worth 3.4 crore Turkish Lira from a parcel booked to Ankara from airport postal customs office during sorting and checking.
The parcel booked as medicines and prescriptions were checked on doubt by customs officials on Wednesday and found it contained high-value notes from Turkey. The parcel was booked at the George Town post office in Chennai, to Ankara in Turkey. Address given in the parcel was found to be bogus.
Following the seizure of foreign currency, which is huge in nature, state and central intelligence agencies had checked the contents.
“The seizure and case will be handed over to enforcement directorate,” airport sources said. Intelligence agencies were interested in the case because the money parcel was addressed to Turkey, a country fighting against ISIS.
It may be recalled that there were seizures of Turkish Lira worth many crores of rupees in the last few months in other cities in India. “There were instances of gangs offering demonetised notes of Turkey for the low exchange rate to the gullible public in a few cities. One Turkish Lira can fetch Rs 19.2 in the exchange market today. So people were buying certain Lira notes for low rate without knowing that those were scrapped notes,” police noted.
