KARACHI: Pakistan International Airline (PIA)’s maintenance staff discovered 27 kilograms of smuggled heroin in the toilet of an on board airplane.
During the routine maintenance, staff discovered heroin that was concealed in urinal panels. The airplane had arrived Karachi on May 24 from Lahore and was set to fly towards Europe.
Spokesperson of PIA told that he had zero acknowledgements about the schedule of flight. He said, “The aircraft was scheduled to go for maintenance, and was not scheduled to fly,”
It is not the first time that smugglers have tried to smuggle illegal drugs via aircrafts. The question that rises here is, when they knew smugglers have used this way to smuggle then why didn’t they make any checks and arrests?
An investigation has begun to arrest the smugglers while Custom officials and Anti-Narcotics Force (ANF) officials seized the drugs at Karachi airport.
Custom officials wrote letters for cooperation to PIA but they did not get a proper response regarding inquiries for heroin smuggling.
Last September, one of the PIA’s flight stewards was terminated from his job when he was caught smuggling phones at Heathrow airport of UK through a PIA flight. A number of PIA’s staff members have been arrested over the years for such attempts of smuggling illegal drugs through international flights to overseas destinations.
