TEHRAN – Goods worth 146 billion rials (nearly $3.4 million at the official rate of 42,000 rials) have been seized from smugglers in the country over the past week, police chief Mohammad Reza Moghimi has announced.

With these measures, the condition has become completely unsafe for the smugglers, Moghimi further stated.

Due to the necessity and sensitivity of providing basic and health-oriented goods, confronting and combating the smugglers of goods and currency is vital, and this is seriously pursued by the police throughout the country, he explained.

During the last week, all kinds of smuggled goods, including mobile phones, home appliances, Bitcoin miners, spare parts, currency, and cosmetics, were discovered in the country with the specialized measures and round-the-clock efforts of the anti-trafficking police, he stated.

The discovered goods were handed over to the Organization for Collection and Sale of State-owned Properties, and 6 smugglers were arrested and handed over to the judicial authorities, he said, IRNA reported on Tuesday.

Smugglers fined $570m in 8 months

From the beginning of the current Iranian calendar year (March 21, 2020) until November 16, 2020, smugglers of fuel and livestock were fined 24 trillion rials (about $570 million), representing a 47 percent increase compared to the same period last [Iranian calendar] year.

Out of a total of about 42,000 smuggling cases, about 28,000 were related to export smuggling, of which 20,000 were related to the smuggling of fuel and petroleum products, mostly to Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to a lesser extent to Turkey and Iraq.

A number of these cases were related to livestock trafficking. Most of the cattle were smuggled to Iraq, and then to the Persian Gulf countries.

Every year, $20-25 billion are smuggled in and out of the country, which, if stopped, will create hundreds of thousands of jobs, Hassan Norouzi, a member of the parliament, said.

In the Iranian calendar year 1396 (March 2017-March 2018), $12 billion was smuggled into Iran and $900 million out of the country, according to the Headquarters for Combating the Smuggling of Commodities and Foreign Exchange.

Iran, which has a 900-kilometer border with Afghanistan, has been used as the main conduit for smuggling Afghan drugs to narcotics kingpins in Europe.

Despite high economic and human costs, Iran has been actively fighting drug-trafficking over the past decades.

In June 2020, the first phase of the national anti-smuggling plan was implemented with the priority given to customs, tobacco, and transit goods.

FB/MG