Two men have been arrested at Bandaranaike International Airport in Katunayake with a consignment of foreign-manufactured cigarettes valued at Rs. 15.99 million, NewsFirst reported.
Customs officers found 533 cartons containing 106,600 cigarettes concealed in four pieces of luggage the men had brought in. The arrests were made during a Customs inspection at the airport.
Both suspects are 42 years old and are described as businessmen resident in Colombo.
The quantities are internally consistent at 200 cigarettes a carton, and the declared value works out at roughly Rs. 30,000 per carton — a Customs assessment that reflects the duty and taxes evaded rather than a shelf price.
Ada Derana also reported the case, placing the arrest on 12 September and saying the pair were stopped while trying to leave through the airport’s Green Channel, the lane reserved for passengers with nothing to declare. That outlet’s site returned a CloudFront error throughout this report, so the detail could not be verified directly and Ada Derana is not cited as a source here.
A steady pattern at Katunayake
Cigarette seizures at BIA have been close to routine this year, and the haul sits mid-range among them. Recent cases in this archive include a foreign national caught with cigarettes brought from Chennai in August, six Chinese nationals held over an Rs. 11 million consignment, a Malaysian national arrested in Colombo, and a much larger Rs. 450 million cold-storage consignment intercepted by Customs in July.
What distinguishes this case from most of those is the profile of the suspects. The majority of recent BIA cigarette arrests have involved foreign nationals or individual couriers; here both men are locally resident businessmen of the same age travelling with four bags between them.
Foreign-manufactured cigarettes carry steep import duties in Sri Lanka, and the margin between duty-paid and smuggled stock is what sustains the traffic through passenger channels.
Not reported
NewsFirst does not name the suspects, say which flight or country they arrived from, state the brand of the cigarettes, or say whether the two were travelling together. It does not say whether they have been produced before a magistrate, whether Customs will pursue an inquiry or prosecution, or whether either man has previously come to Customs’ attention.
Hiru News carried nothing on the case and the Daily Mirror’s listings were unavailable at the time of writing.
