Free holidays in exchange for smoke smuggling

LONDON - Cigarette smuggling into Britain is becoming so lucrative that growing numbers of young women are being offered free summer holidays by criminals in return for trafficking tobacco.

UK border officials are seizing almost 50 million contraband cigarettes a month, and evidence has emerged that smuggling syndicates are bribing girls as young as 15 with flights to Spain, accommodation and pocket money.

Police say the girls are encouraged to travel through smaller British airports to avoid detection, with the Canary Islands emerging as the most popular destination for cigarette smugglers.

Cheap flights are reserved in advance by criminal gangs, who also provide empty suitcases for the youngsters to fill with as much illicit tobacco as possible.

A UK Border Agency spokesman said in most cases the young women were unaware they were working for often violent individuals involved in cigarette contraband, one of Europe's fastest-growing forms of organised crime.

He said: "Cigarette smuggling is a serious organised crime and often provides the funding for much larger criminal operations such as drug smuggling or people trafficking."

Last month four schoolgirls, aged 15 and 16 from County Durham, northeastern England, narrowly avoided jail after being caught smuggling 200,000 cigarettes into Britain.

And two weeks ago a court heard how one girl was caught at Robin Hood Airport, Doncaster, in the north of England, on her third trip to the Canary Islands.

The girl was arrested with her three friends by customs officers who discovered more than 66,000 cigarettes in their luggage.

Initially, they denied they were smuggling cigarettes until the oldest revealed that they had been hired by criminals and that they had been heading abroad on an "organised fag run".

The four have refused to reveal who organised their trip and gave them £150 ($355) in spending money. Officers believe they are terrified of reprisals if they divulge the identities of those behind the scam.

The girls, who live near Sunderland, on the northeast coast of England, were found with 15,000 cigarettes crammed in each of their suitcases and another 1600 in their hand luggage. Each should have paid £2900 in duty.

UK Border officials said that from January until the end of July they had intercepted more than 340 million cigarettes, which was equivalent to a potential loss of £65 million in tax revenue.

Tobacco companies are also reporting huge falls in sales with the British-listed British American Tobacco and Imperial Tobacco registering around £600 million in lost business each year.

In addition, shopkeepers, wholesalers and distributors are estimated to be losing £230 million to smugglers annually.

Police believe the ruse is attractive to criminal gangs because the profits are similar to those made by trafficking drugs, but with less punitive penalties.

Typically, the contraband tobacco is sold at informal markets, pub carparks or street markets.

- OBSERVER