Smuggling

The hangar at the Medininkai border checkpoint caught fire early Thursday as officers were checking a car carrying smuggled cigarettes from Belarus, Lithuanian Customs says.

A suspected leader of an international drug trafficking group was detained in Lithuania last week, the Customs Criminal Service said on Tuesday.

The 2017 growth of the amount of illicit tobacco products in Lithuania was the biggest over the past five years, with smuggled cigarettes accounting for nearly a fifth of the cigarette consumption level, according to an empty pack survey carried out by Nielsen.

Another huge haul of smuggled cigarettes, worth 1.3 million euros, has been seized in Lithuania, the customs service said on Tuesday.

Nine Lithuanian nationals have been detained during an international operation in Lithuania on the suspicion of links with terrorism and arms smuggling, in addition to another 15 Lithuanians busted in Spain.

Lithuanian customs officers found almost €400,000 worth of psychotropic tablets hidden in a car they stopped at the border with Latvia last weekend, the Customs Criminal Service said on Thursday. To read this article, try a €5.99 monthly subscription by clicking here.

Lithuanian customs officers discovered old silver coins hidden in a book of horror stories, the Customs Department said on Thursday.

On Thursday, officers of the Lithuanian State Border Guard Service detained a Polish citizen who had more than a ton of raw tobacco aboard his Peugeot Boxer minivan en route from Lithuania.

Four out of five packets of smuggled cigarettes in Lithuania come from Belarus, according to a survey of used packets conducted at the end of last year by Nielsen.

The Lithuanian police have seized 320 kilograms of hashish with a street value of up to €4 million after carrying out an operation in Klaipėda.

Lithuanian customs officers seized smuggled items worth over €30 million last year, according to preliminary data.

Flourishing black market in Lithuania can be reduced with properly chosen and implemented digital solutions, experts claim.

Illicit cigarettes last year accounted for 28.3 percent of Lithuania's market of tobacco products, the second highest rate in Europe after Latvia's, according to the latest study by the international audit, tax and consulting company KPMG.

Continued flows of cigarettes smuggling into Lithuania have highlighted a new tendency – increasing amounts of tobacco enter the country from the European Union's (EU) member-state Latvia rather than the Russian Kaliningrad region or Belarus, as the case was before, the Lietuvos Žinios daily said.

Lithuanian customs are stepping up the control on the border with Latvia in response to the growing flows of cigarette smuggling.

Lithuanian customs officers have found smuggled cigarettes inside a car belonging to a foreign embassy in Lithuania, the Lithuanian Customs said on Friday.

Lithuanian customs officers on Friday detained a huge shipment of smuggling drugs in the port city of Klaipėda – three sacks containing a total of 116 kg of cocaine were discovered in a sea container.

Lithuanian customs officers seized over 5,000 items in the first half of this year, suspected of having been produced in violation of intellectual rights.