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BRASILIA - Postal workers in a Brazilian border town were stunned to find scorpions and poisonous snakes in packages being mailed from Argentina.
The contraband cargo, which also included iguanas, tortoises and lizards, were discovered when the workers had the boxes x-rayed.
A spokesman for the federal police in Foz do Iguacu, the town on the border with Argentina and Paraguay where the incident occurred, said animals shipped into the country often end up in Europe "where they charge three, four, five times as much".
Television stations broadcast images of brightly coloured tropical snakes coiled and stuffed into plastic containers, the kind typically used for takeaway orders at the deli counter.
The contraband animals had crossed the border from Argentina and were being express-mailed to Brazilian cities, police officer Emerson Rodrigues said.
- REUTERS
