Within a single day, Belarusian customs officers working jointly with the national drug-control service shut down a large trafficking channel moving prohibited substances from the European Union to Russia that had been organized by an international criminal group.[1] Brest customs officers detected the first load during an in-depth inspection of a Polish-driven truck at the Kozlovichi checkpoint that was declared as carrying McDonald’s products from Poland onward into Asia.[1] Vitebsk customs officers detained a Belarusian man as he tried to take hashish to Russia, after he dumped two similarly packed spare wheels holding 146 briquettes into a ravine and tried to flee toward Russian territory on learning the Pole had been caught.[1] In Brest, officers working with the Brest police drug-control units detained an Armenia-born man as he tried to flee with eight similar spare wheels that had been stored in the garage of a Ukraine-born associate.[1] Five people had been detained in the case, the deputy interior minister told a press conference on 17 July.[2] Brest Customs opened criminal cases against a group acting in prior conspiracy for unlawful movement of drugs and psychotropics across the EAEU customs border under part 2 of article 328-1, with further investigative work continuing.[1]
From two spare wheels of the Polish truck, officers recovered 145 briquettes containing 184 kg of hashish after the concealment defeated initial X-ray screening and the vehicle was sent for deeper inspection.[1] Together with the load dumped in the ravine, the hashish totaled 372 kg, which customs described as more than 130,000 single doses worth about 5.7 million dollars.[1] The smugglers filled the hollow wheels with air to fake normal density and sprinkled the drugs with peppers to mask their smell.[1] They moved the drug-filled wheels by different kinds of transport through different checkpoints using different carriers to keep the group from being identified at the outset.[1]
The drugs were intended for sale in Russia.[2] Belarusian police said the trafficking organizers were in Poland and that at least three were known.[2] The same operation also recovered 680 briquettes with almost 706 kg of the psychotropic 4-CMC from the eight wheels handled in Brest, a synthetic drug recorded here only as context and not as cannabis.[1] Customs presented the combined 1,077 kg haul as the largest drug and psychotropic seizure in sovereign Belarus’s history.[1]
