9 November 2024 12:00 am Views - 80
| Pic by Nimalsiri Edirisinghe |
By Kurulu Koojana Kariyakarawana
A large stock of counterfeit cigarettes seized by the Sri Lanka Customs from the airport, which was worth over Rs.390 million was destroyed at the Western Power Waste-to-Energy Power Plant in Kerawalapitiya this week.
The Customs authorities with the Ceylon Tobacco Company (CTC) officials destroyed about 2.6 million sticks of a range of foreign brands of cigarettes smuggled into the country by passengers coming through the Bandaranaike International Airport (BIA).
The BIA Customs officials made a series of detections in the past two months when inbound local passengers returning from Middle Eastern countries tried to smuggle in millions of rupees worth of illicit cigarettes.
A container load of the seized cigarettes were dumped into the garbage incineration plant at the Western Power Plant under the supervision of Customs and CTC officials.