A 51-year-old businessman has been fined Rs. 3.7 million and stripped of a consignment of gold jewellery worth more than Rs. 36.5 million after being stopped at Bandaranaike International Airport, NewsFirst reported.
Officers of the Police Narcotics Bureau detained him during a raid at the airport. The jewellery — 996 grams, just under a kilogram — had been concealed on his body in four parcels. He is a resident of Pallekele, Kandy.
He had arrived at the airport from Dubai on 3 October, Newswire reported.
Customs took over, and the case ended in a fine
The suspect and the jewellery were handed to Sri Lanka Customs at the airport. A formal Customs inquiry ran into the early hours of 4 October, after which the jewellery was ordered confiscated and the passenger fined Rs. 3.7 million.
That is the full disposal as reported: the matter was settled inside the Customs process rather than taken to court. Neither outlet says whether he was separately produced before a magistrate, whether he has been released, or whether investigators believe he was carrying the metal for someone else.
Gold brought into Sri Lanka above the personal allowance must be declared and attracts duty. An undeclared consignment is treated as an illegal import, and the value attached to a seizure is the assessed market value of the metal and workmanship — not a penalty figure. The Rs. 3.7 million is the penalty; the Rs. 36.5 million is what was taken.
This is not the Rs. 36.6 million seizure from five days ago
The valuation is close enough to a recent case to be confusing, and the two are separate incidents.
On 29 September, Airport Police Narcotic Bureau officers stopped a 38-year-old woman from Halgahadeniya, Angoda with 916 grams of bangles and necklaces in 12 parcels inside a travel bag, valued at Rs. 36,628,937 — also arriving from Dubai.
The distinguishing facts are the carrier and the packing: a woman with 12 parcels in a bag on 29 September, a man with four parcels strapped to his body on 3–4 October. The two consignments are valued within about Rs. 100,000 of each other even though this week’s is roughly 80 grams heavier, so the rupee figure alone will not separate them.
Smaller seizures of the same type run through the year, including a Matale businessman held in July with 271 grams worth Rs. 11.8 million, also off a Dubai flight.
Sourcing note
Ada Derana also filed on this seizure — its headline is indexed by search engines — but the site returned a CloudFront 403 to every retrieval route attempted, for the eighth consecutive day. LankaNewz has not reproduced any detail it could not fetch directly, including the flight number and arrival time that other summaries attribute to that report. No filing from Hiru News or the Daily Mirror was found.
