Customs and CTC destroy Rs.390Mn worth counterfeit fags seized from BIA

• Cigarettes seized through multiple detections over the past two months

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.