TEHRAN – Goods worth 316 billion rials (nearly $7.5 million at the official rate of 42,000 rials) have been seized from smugglers in the country over the past week, police official Jalal Amini said on Sunday.

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 added.

The discovered goods were handed over to the Organization for Collection and Sale of State-owned Properties, and 23 smugglers were arrested and handed over to the judicial authorities, IRNA quoted Amini as saying.

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