TEHRAN – The Iranian police arrested 301 individuals for smuggling goods worth 278 billion rials (about $6.5 million) on Thursday.

Kinds of goods, including home appliances, cosmetics, computer equipment, cell phones, medical devices, clothing, fuel, and animal feedstock were discovered and confiscated from the smugglers, IRNA quoted police official Sohrab Bahrami as saying.

Smuggled goods and currency worth 126 trillion rials (nearly $3 billion) have been discovered across the country over the past eleven months, Mohammad Reza Moghimi, the police chief, said on March 12.

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, has 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.

MG