operation on a Ukraine-flagged dry cargo vessel passing through
Istanbul’s Bosphorus Strait on July 14, the largest amount of cigarette
packages ever seized on water.
The vessel carrying over 100
tons of cigarettes worth more than 28.5 million Turkish Liras was
stopped by Turkish authorities on the Bosphorus upon a tracking
operation initiated by received intelligence.
Istanbul Maritime
Customs Enforcement teams began to track the vessel, which had left the
Famagusta Port in Turkish Cyprus and was headed to Ukraine’s Skadovsk
Port, as part of a wide-scale search after they received information
that a consignment of smuggled cigarettes was expected to be carried
out.
According to the tracking teams, the vessel first entered
Turkish territorial waters and then reached Ukrainian territorial waters
after passing through the Bosphorus. After receiving forged documents
that it had unloaded its cargo in Ukraine, the ship headed back to
Turkish territorial waters. While passing through the Bosphorus again
and advancing toward the coast of Istanbul’s Küçükçekmece district, the
ship’s crew was contacted by coastal security teams and the crew
declared they had unloaded their cargo in Ukraine.
While
carrying out a raid with the support of coastal security on the vessel
off the Zeytinburnu district, the teams seized some 3.3 million packages
of cigarettes weighing more than 100 tons.
Teams also detained six people on the vessel.
Recently
some 5 million packages of smuggled cigarettes were found by
gendarmerie teams during operations in the southeastern province of
Hakkari.
The contraband cigarettes were found during raids conducted in villages in the province’s Yüksekova and Şemdinli districts.
The smugglers reportedly provided financial support to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), with PKK militants levying “taxes” on smugglers carrying out these illegal activities on Turkey’s borders with Iraq and Iran.
A
total of 385.8 million packages of smuggled cigarettes have been seized
in operations conducted by the Turkish authorities since 2013, while
3,145 suspects have been arrested.
