Sri Lanka Customs has seized more than 200,000 Chinese-manufactured cigarettes with an estimated market value of over Rs. 30 million, found concealed within a container imported from China, Hiru News reported.
The consignment was detected during examination of a container of imported goods. Investigations are continuing.
The concealment method is described two ways
The two available accounts differ on how the cigarettes were hidden, and the difference is not cosmetic.
Hiru says the cigarettes were “cleverly concealed to appear as steel doors” — that is, packaged so the consignment itself passed as a shipment of doors. Newswire, which filed on Monday evening, says instead that they were concealed inside metal doors imported from China, with Customs stating that they had been carefully hidden within the doors to evade detection.
One describes a disguised cargo, the other a genuine cargo used as a hiding place. Neither account resolves the other.
The two also name a different Customs unit. Hiru credits the raid to officers at the head office of the Customs Revenue Monitoring Directorate; Newswire attributes the detection, and the continuing investigation, to the Customs Revenue Task Force. Newswire is a wire aggregator rather than an originating newsroom, and no verified newsroom other than Hiru had reported the seizure at the time of writing.
A recurring method
Concealment inside manufactured panels and fittings has become the pattern in the larger cigarette cases of this year. In July, Customs’ Central Intelligence Unit seized 3.6 million Chinese cigarettes worth Rs. 450 million hidden inside insulated “cold storage” panels — an operation more than ten times the size of this one, using the same basic idea of building the cargo around the contraband.
That contrasts with the airport cases, which run through passengers rather than freight: a Chinese national was held at Bandaranaike International Airport with 40,200 cigarettes in July, and separate groups of Chinese travellers have been detained there over comparable hauls.
Imported cigarettes carry high excise and import duties in Sri Lanka, which is what makes the freight route worth the engineering.
What has not been reported
Neither account named the importer or the declared contents of the container, said where the container was examined, gave the brand or carton count behind the 200,000 figure, or reported any arrest. Neither said when the detection was made — Newswire filed on 1 September and Hiru on 2 September, and neither carried a date for the raid itself.
Readers should also note that a Rs. 30 million valuation has attached to an unrelated earlier Customs cigarette case at the airport; the two are separate events.
