Foreign cigarettes worth Rs 2.69 crore seized

Kolkata: The Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) seized 26,99,900 sticks of Myanmarese and Korean origin cigarettes and arrested a person from Murshidabad in this connection. The value of the seized cigarettes amount to Rs 2.69 crore.

The articles were smuggled in a truck with sticker "Army on Duty " with the purpose of ruling out any suspicion of malpractice but the DRI sleuths, acting on intelligence inputs, intercepted a six-wheeler container truck near Chander More on NH-34 at Murshidabad and seized the cigarettes.

"The truck was on its way from Naogoan Assam to Dankuni in Bengal. The recovered foreign origin cigarettes were smuggled from Myanmar into India through the porous Indo-Myanmar border," a DRI officer said. The cigarettes were of different brands such as Win, Paris, Ruili River, Esse Light and Esse Gold, which have their origin in Korea and Myanmar.

The person arrested under the provisions of the Customs Act, 1962, is the driver of the vehicle, Laxmi Narayan. The DRI official said that with the current seizure the total value of seizure of smuggled cigarettes by DRI Kolkata Zone during the current financial year has gone upto Rs 6.44 crores.