The contraband was seized from a handbag belonging to one of the two Syrian crew members of an Ajman (UAE)-registered cargo ship, MV King, which is being scrapped at Alang.

Syrian citizens Ibrahim Alchugri Abdullah and Hesham Ahmad Qutef were arrested from a waiting lounge in the Sardar Patel International Airport on charges of illegal possession of ivory and attempt to smuggle it out of India. The two men have said in their statements before the Customs department that they had bought the consignment from Matwara Port in Tanzania and were taking it to Sharjah by an Air Arabia flight. The seized ivory has been sent to the Directorate of Forensic Sciences (DFS), Gandhinagar.

“It is speculated that the ivory is of an Indian elephant,” said a senior officer in the Bhavnagar Commissionerate of Gujarat Customs. Incidentally, the officials refused to admit that that the contraband was spotted not by the Customs but by an X-ray machine in the airport’s departure terminal. “A security officer got suspicious and intimated other agencies and the Customs department,” an airport official said. According to the Customs department, MV King had sailed from Bundar Abbas in Iran and reached Alang on January 12 this year. The scrapping deal for the ship was finalised through a Bhavnagar-based shipping agent, Admiral Shipping.

“Following this, the cargo ship, which was anchored off Alang for nearly two months, was brought here in the last week of February,” the officer added.