A 45-year-old woman returning from employment in Saudi Arabia has been fined Rs. 100,000 after Sri Lanka Customs officers found 35,200 foreign-manufactured cigarettes in her luggage at Bandaranaike International Airport.
The woman, a resident of the Kandy area, was stopped at about 6.15 a.m. on Friday as she attempted to pass through the airport’s “Green Channel” — the exit reserved for passengers who have nothing to declare.
Customs officers searching her baggage found 176 cartons of cigarettes concealed across four pieces of luggage. The consignment was valued at approximately Rs. 5.28 million.
According to Customs, the woman had worked as a domestic worker in Saudi Arabia for two years and had purchased the cigarettes in Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates, while travelling home at the end of her employment.
Following a formal Customs inquiry, the cigarettes were confiscated and the woman was ordered to pay a Rs. 100,000 fine.
A steady pattern at Katunayake
The case is the latest in a near-continuous run of cigarette seizures at the airport. Customs and the Police Narcotics Bureau have intercepted comparable consignments repeatedly in recent weeks, including a Rs. 6 million haul carried from Dubai in early August and a case involving a Chinese national days earlier. Enforcement is not limited to the airport: the Navy and Special Task Force seized smuggled cigarettes off Puttalam on August 10.
Sri Lanka levies steep import duties on tobacco, and the margin between duty-free Gulf prices and the local retail price is what sustains the traffic. Returning migrant workers are frequently recruited or induced to carry consignments through on arrival, and the Green Channel is the standard point of interception.
Duty-free allowances for arriving passengers do not extend to commercial quantities of tobacco, and consignments on this scale are treated as attempted smuggling rather than personal import.
