Weird news - Laxative helps in retrieving smuggled gold biscuits

Smuggling takes many shapes and sizes; and there will be smuggling when an item is priced differently in different countries, or there are duties or levies that cause these differences in prices and hence drive the process of smuggling. Smuggling can be done through the shipment of regular items (within these items - for example, gold is shaped into different items and then coated or painted to seem normal); these can be transported to land in beaches at night where there is lower chance of detection, can be carried across borders that are impossible to verify 100%.
And then you have human carriers who carry smuggled items through airports, and the most extreme case is that of people who swallow these items and hope that they remain undetected. This can prove very dangerous for those who are carrying drugs in packets - if these packets open during the time that they are in the body, the person can die. For others, such as in this case, if they are detected, there is really no option that to force them to expel these items from their bodies, which is done by giving them laxatives and the items then appearing when they do their poop (link to article):

Mushir Ahmed, who came from Kuala Lumpur by an Air Asia flight on Thursday night, was detained while he was waiting near the conveyor belt to collect his checked-in baggage after clearing immigration by an official of the air intelligence unit. “He appeared tense. We approached him and after interrogation that lasted for barely a couple of minutes, we were definite something was wrong,” a customs official said. Ahmed was taken inside the detention room and the metal detector corroborated that there was some metal inside his stomach. But he kept insisting there was a problem with the machine. “For the next three or four hours, we gave him a laxative and asked him to consume water at regular intervals. At dawn, he went to relieve himself and the gold biscuits emerged,” a customs official said.

It seems a bit yucky, but there is a lot of money involved and it happens often enough that there must be processes to deal with it.