Three Pakistani nationals who landed at the Tribhuvan International Airport from the Qatari capital Doha were arrested in Kathmandu on Friday.

Nasir Uddin, Mohammad Akhtar and Nadiya Anbar were arrested with two briefcases full of Indian currency amounting to INR76,794,000.

“We suspect the bills to be fake. We will send the bills to the Nepal Rastra Bank for further analysis,” said Gajendra Kumar Thakur, chief at the airport customs.

Uddin was passing through regular security check at the airport when the content of his briefcase aroused suspicion among the customs officials, said Thakur.  The x-ray machine had detected a huge quantity of papers in the briefcase.

Officials then put an ‘RC’ tag on the briefcase and let Uddin pass through the security check. According to customs officials, an RC tag is put on luggage deemed suspicious.

On the other side of the security check area, Uddin’s briefcase was manually checked by officials. “We found that the briefcase was filled with Indian currency of Rs 2,000 bills,” said Thakur.

According to Thakur, when the officials took away Uddin for questioning, Atar and Anbar removed the tag in their briefcase; however, since only three Pakistani nationals had landed in Nepal from the same flight, the security tracked the other two and their briefcase was also manually checked. “Upon checking, we found that their briefcase was also full of Indian currency,” said Thakur.

The customs officials with the help of the airport police devised a plan to arrest those who would come to receive the trio. For that, they sent Uddin outside the airport with an empty briefcase.

There were three people waiting for the Uddin outside the airport. They have been identified as Yunus Ansari, Suyal Khan and Sudan Ranabhat.

“The three individuals waiting outside were also arrested. Preliminary investigation shows that the final receiver of the illegally smuggled currency was Ansari,” said Thakur.

Ansari is not an unfamiliar name in the smuggling of counterfeit Indian currency. According to police, he has been arrested twice for counterfeiting currency in the past.

“Ansari was first arrested in 2010 with around Rs 2.5 million counterfeit Indian currency and drugs from Thamel, and was sent to jail. After he was released after couple of years, he was again arrested from Lalitpur in 2014 with around Rs3.5 million fake Indian currency,” Senior Superintendent of Police Shyam Lal Gyawali, spokesperson of Metropolitan Police Office, told the Post.

While serving his sentence in the central jail after his arrest from Thamel, Ansari was shot by Jasjeet Singh, aka Bijaya, 42, who had reached the prison on the pretext of meeting Charles Sobhraj.

Ansari is the son of former minister, Salim Miya Ansari.

According to Senior Superintendent of Police Sandip Bhandari, chief of airport police, all six individuals will be sent to the Metropolitan Police Range, Kathmandu, for further legal proceeding