Smuggling

A weather balloon landed in a military area in Alytus, southern Lithuania, on Tuesday. It is believed that it was carrying smuggled cigarettes from Belarus. On Wednesday, 2 October, another weather balloon was noticed in a military area in Vilnius district.

A weather balloon carrying a black box has been found in the territory of Alytus-based military battalion, southern Lithuania, military police said. The balloon is believed to have taken off from Belarus and used by smugglers. It was detected on Tuesday night.

Border guards are neither authorised to down weather balloons smuggling goods nor do they have the right equipment to do so, says the chief of the State Border Guard Service (VSAT).

A citizen of Ukraine will stand trial for smuggling 15 irregular migrants across the border of Lithuania. Investigators found that he was illegally transporting citizens of Afghanistan who did not have residence permits in Lithuania.

Cigarette smuggling has halved in Lithuania this year. In January-May 2024, border guards intercepted 587,000 packs of smuggled cigarettes, compared with 1.1 million in the same period of 2023.

On Saturday night, a border guard fired his service weapon mortally wounding a Lithuanian citizen suspected of transporting smuggled goods, the State Border Guard Service (VSAT) stated.

The hangar at the Medininkai border checkpoint caught fire early Thursday as officers were checking a car carrying smuggled cigarettes from Belarus, Lithuanian Customs says.

A suspected leader of an international drug trafficking group was detained in Lithuania last week, the Customs Criminal Service said on Tuesday.

The 2017 growth of the amount of illicit tobacco products in Lithuania was the biggest over the past five years, with smuggled cigarettes accounting for nearly a fifth of the cigarette consumption level, according to an empty pack survey carried out by Nielsen.

Another huge haul of smuggled cigarettes, worth 1.3 million euros, has been seized in Lithuania, the customs service said on Tuesday.

Nine Lithuanian nationals have been detained during an international operation in Lithuania on the suspicion of links with terrorism and arms smuggling, in addition to another 15 Lithuanians busted in Spain.

Lithuanian customs officers found almost €400,000 worth of psychotropic tablets hidden in a car they stopped at the border with Latvia last weekend, the Customs Criminal Service said on Thursday. To read this article, try a €5.99 monthly subscription by clicking here.

Lithuanian customs officers discovered old silver coins hidden in a book of horror stories, the Customs Department said on Thursday.

On Thursday, officers of the Lithuanian State Border Guard Service detained a Polish citizen who had more than a ton of raw tobacco aboard his Peugeot Boxer minivan en route from Lithuania.

Four out of five packets of smuggled cigarettes in Lithuania come from Belarus, according to a survey of used packets conducted at the end of last year by Nielsen.

The Lithuanian police have seized 320 kilograms of hashish with a street value of up to €4 million after carrying out an operation in Klaipėda.

Lithuanian customs officers seized smuggled items worth over €30 million last year, according to preliminary data.

Flourishing black market in Lithuania can be reduced with properly chosen and implemented digital solutions, experts claim.

Illicit cigarettes last year accounted for 28.3 percent of Lithuania's market of tobacco products, the second highest rate in Europe after Latvia's, according to the latest study by the international audit, tax and consulting company KPMG.

Continued flows of cigarettes smuggling into Lithuania have highlighted a new tendency – increasing amounts of tobacco enter the country from the European Union's (EU) member-state Latvia rather than the Russian Kaliningrad region or Belarus, as the case was before, the Lietuvos Žinios daily said.