Authorities in Vietnam said Monday they had seized more than 100 metric tons of goods illegally brought to the country from China and taken into custody several people implicated in the smuggling.
Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security caught 24 people in the act of transferring contraband from trucks with foreign license plates onto Vietnamese trucks in the northern border province of Lang Son on December 14.
Two of the people hold foreign nationality while the others are Vietnamese.
Police later detained eight people on smuggling charges and kept seven trucks, including two foreign vehicles.
The 100-ton haul of contraband, including a wide variety of goods from tobacco and automobile parts to household appliances, was worth several billion dong (VND1 billion = $43,000).
Around 52,000 cases of illegal cross-border transportation of goods were booked in the first half of this year in Vietnam, whose areas contiguous to Cambodia in the southwest and to China in the north are smuggling hot spots.
Topping the contraband list were cigarettes, tobacco, alcoholic drinks, candy, sugar and clothes.
Vietnam customs seized nearly three million cigarette packages in 1,033 smuggling cases revealed over the past four years but only one was handled with criminal charges.
The reason, the department said, was that smugglers tried to carry less than 1,500 cigarette packets, below the level where criminal charges can be pursued.
According to a report on Tuoi Tre News