Criminal proceedings against an organized group sent for prosecution

Officials of the Criminal Investigation Units of the Latvian State Border Guard completed the investigation in the criminal proceedings initiated in the spring of this year and sent the criminal case to the Daugavpils Prosecutor’s Office with a proposal to initiate criminal prosecution against nine suspects.

Nine members of an organized group who were detained at the time of committing the crime on May 20 this year are suspected of smuggling goods subject to customs duties – cigarettes into Latvia. At the time, border guards seized more than 5.5 million smuggled cigarettes.

The initiated criminal proceedings according to the characteristics of the criminal offense provided for in Section 190, Paragraph three of the Criminal Law (for smuggling, if committed by an organized group or on a large scale) were in the records of the State Border Guard Criminal Investigation Unit in accordance with the decision of the Prosecutor General

As already reported, on the night of 19-20 May, border guards detained nine persons, eight Latvian nationals and one Latvian A Belarusian citizen, a truck driver, and a search of a truck and a trailer in a farm building found 5,675,180 cigarettes of various brands with Belarusian excise stamps. The car entered Latvia with a hidden load of cigarettes in solar cell constructions only less than a day earlier.