On January 5, Minsk /Corr. BELTA/. Vitebsk customs officers have thwarted another attempt to smuggle a large illegal batch of Belarusian cigarettes into Latvia. This was reported to a BELTA correspondent by the press service of the State Customs Committee of Belarus. At the "Bigosovo-2" customs clearance point of Vitebsk customs, 59.5 thousand packs of cigarettes with a total value of about Br160 million were seized. The contraband was discovered in two railway gondola cars carrying "bituminous coal". In the freight train, which was travelling on the Polotsk-Ventspils route, 119 boxes of "Premier" tobacco products, marked with Belarusian excise stamps, were carefully hidden in the raw fuel. This cargo was not declared in the shipping documents. As noted by the SCC, this is not the first case of tobacco contraband being discovered at the "Bigosovo-2" RPTU in coal wagons recently. Numerous tricks and stratagems have long been studied by Belarusian customs officers, and criminals, for some reason, operate according to the same scheme, the SCC noted. This time, the illegal transport of cigarettes across the Belarusian-Latvian border has failed again. -0-

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