Smugglers float cigarettes across Neris river on an inflatable mattress with GPS
Lithuanian border guards detained a cargo of more than a thousand packets of smuggled cigarettes floating in Neris river and suspected a Vilnius resident planning to pick it up.
The suspicious object floating in the river was captured by the officers of the Pavoverė border guard of the SBGS Vilnius border team about midnight from Sunday to Monday. The place is located near Bareišiūnai village in Švenčionys district, and the Lithuanian-Belarusian border here runs in the middle of the river. In total, Nerimi in Švenčionys district runs about 7 kilometers from the Lithuanian-Belarusian border. Later, the river turns into the territory of Lithuania.
About 5 kilometers from Bareišiūnai, near Kūniškės village in Švenčionys district, the cargo of the border guards crashed to the shore. Here the wall of the river no longer runs. The border guards organized an ambush. For more than half a day, the SBGS officials who had been there saw one person floating on an inflatable mattress from the opposite bank of the river, which belongs to the Vilnius district. He broke up to the cargo. When the man tried to lift him on the mattress, the border guards detained the swimmer. The width of the Neris in this place is about 60 meters.
It turned out that the detainee is a 31-year-old resident of Vilnius district. The cargo consisted of 4 boxes wrapped in polyethylene, containing 1,010 packets of NZ Gold and NZ 10 cigarettes with Belarusian stamps. Attached to them was a GPS receiver, which smugglers typically use to track floating cigarettes.
Smugglers who dropped this cargo off in Belarus are believed to have tried to make it look like the sex of ice, and therefore masked it with white polyethylene.
A resident of Vilnius district faces a fine of 5,200 to 6,000 euros for the transportation of excise goods. In addition, he violated the ban on movement between municipalities during quarantine. There is still a fine of between 500 and 1,500 euros for this.
