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Cigarette smuggling reached drug trade proportions, State Border Committee says

 

The smuggling of cigarettes from Belarus into the European Union has reached the scale of illegal drug trade, the State Border Committee said on May 16.

The SBC said that millions of cigarette packs were seized from smugglers on both sides of the Belarusian border every year and the illegal business was worth millions of dollars. Belarusian cigarettes are also seized inside the EU, it said.

The SBC noted that increasingly more residents of border areas in Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland were getting involved in cigarette smuggling. Unlike drug traders, cigarette smugglers do not run the risk of ending up in prison and can only be fined, according to the Committee.

The SBC stressed that most cigarette smuggling rings were run from the neighboring EU countries.

On May 15, Belarusian border guards seized 12,500 cigarette packs inside a Nissan at the Lithuanian border. Five people were arrested over the smuggling attempt. // BelaPAN