In a few days, customs officers and gendarmes in the Pyrénées-Orientales made several major tobacco seizures. Seizures more and more often accompanied by refusal to comply.
A first time near Bourg-Madame, a town located about 80 km from Perpignan, on the road to Andorra. The driver made a U-turn in front of customs officers… before finding himself stuck in the line of cars stopped by customs control. The Bourg-Madame customs brigade seized 392 cartons of cigarettes and 2 kg of rolling tobacco. All for a value of 39,000 euros. The minor driver without a license and his passenger were handed over to the gendarmerie.
Accident, hit and run, smuggling and jail time
A few days later, it was the turn of the Porta customs brigade to arrest, after several injunctions, an Albanian national. On board the vehicle, customs officers discovered 830 cartons of cigarettes, or 166 kg of manufactured tobacco, again from Andorra. Goods worth 80,000 euros.
On October 21, following a traffic accident with hit and run, the gendarmes seized a vehicle in which were two men. In particular an Algerian in an irregular situation, but also a hundred cartons of cigarettes bought in Spain. The Perpignan criminal court sentenced them to four and six months in prison with continued detention.