TORONTO \u2014 A man who admitted his role in the massive gold and cash heist from Toronto\u2019s Pearson airport has been sentenced to four years in prison.<\/p>\n
Court documents show that 44-year-old Arslan Chaudhary was sentenced in a Brampton, Ont., courthouse on Wednesday and given 40 years to pay back $22 million in restitution.<\/p>\n
Chaudhary was arrested earlier this year as he flew in from Dubai and he was charged in what police have called the largest gold heist in Canadian history.<\/p>\n
Police have said that on April 17, 2023, a flight arriving from Zurich, Switzerland carried a cargo shipment containing 400 kilograms of gold \u2014 valued at more than $20 million at the time \u2014 and about $2.5 million in foreign currency, and the items were reported missing from a separate area of Pearson airport the following day.<\/p>\n
Multiple suspects have since been arrested in the case and as of earlier this year, two others \u2014 including a former Air Canada employee \u2014 were still at large.<\/p>\n
Court documents show that Chaudhary pleaded guilty to theft over $5,000 and his prison sentence includes a credit of 174 days, some of which were previously spent in custody.<\/p>\n
Police have said that they believe the suspects melted the stolen gold and sold it to fund illegal activities, including the purchase of illegal firearms.<\/p>\n
Investigators were able to seize at least one kilogram of gold believed to be from the theft, as well as smelting equipment and several hundred thousand dollars in currency.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TORONTO \u2014 A man who admitted his role in the massive gold and cash heist from Toronto\u2019s Pearson…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":593498,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194291],"tags":[49,48,3302],"class_list":["post-594360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-toronto","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-toronto"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/594360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=594360"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/594360\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/593498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=594360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=594360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=594360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}