Thaindian News

Kathmandu, March 16 (IANS) A 55-year-old Pakistani woman has been arrested at the Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu with fake Indian currency worth Rs.3 million, police said.
Mariam Wali Mohammad, apparently travelling alone from Karachi, was nabbed after she arrived at the airport on a Pakistan International Airlines flight and was seeking to emerge from it Monday.

The woman was carrying the money in fake notes of Rs.1,000 and Rs.500, which had been concealed among clothes in a carton.

“We received information that the runners of the fake Indian currency network had switched over to women couriers,” Nepal Police spokesman Bigyan Raj Sharma told IANS. “The woman was under our surveillance and we arrested her as she was heading for Customs.”

This is the first time that a Pakistani woman has been arrested while acting as a courier for fake Indian currency.

Sharma said Mohammad has been taken into custody for investigation and a hunt was on to arrest her accomplices in Nepal.

She is the third Pakistani to be caught with fake Indian currency in Kathmandu in less than three weeks.

The arrest comes even as two leading Nepalis’ involvement in running a fake Indian currency racket from Karachi through Nepal to India and the Middle East still remains in the headlines.

In January, the son of a former powerful politician, Yunus Ansari, was arrested by police along with his bodyguard and two Pakistanis, who had flown the fake Indian notes from Karachi to allegedly hand over the consignment to Ansari.

While the case of Ansari, who owns a television channel, is in court, the cross-boundary crime is said to have led to the murder of controversial Nepali media baron Jamim Shah, who was alleged to have been Karachi-based terror kingpin Dawood Ibrahim’s lieutenant in Nepal.

Shah was killed in broad daylight recently and Nepal Police have pinned it on a jailed Indian don, Babloo Srivastava, whose gang became involved in a war with Dawood.

Fake Indian currency worth millions make their way to India from Nepal daily through the open border and the airport despite stepped-up vigilance.

Security reports have also indicated the fake money also pouring in from Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Indian intelligence agencies allege Pakistan’s security agency Inter-Services Intelligence is involved in the manufacturing of the fake notes that are becoming increasingly difficult to detect.