One of the shipments of hashish was seized at the beginning of the month and contained around 300 kilograms of hashish. Two more shipments, allegedly organized by the same group, were subsequently seized.
The group had previously been under scrutiny for allegedly attempting to smuggle 900,000 cigarettes in February.
"A long investigation, gathering evidence, collecting information. As a result, it was possible to apprehend the persons who organized the shipment, the direct executors and the cargo itself," explained Aigars Prusaks, Director of the Tax and Customs Police Directorate of the VID.
The drugs were trying to leave Latvia for Russia. They bear identifying marks, possibly the logo of the organization.
In total, the VID seized hundreds of packages, each weighing about one and a half kilograms. The total weight is over 700 kilograms.
It is rare for so many drugs to be seized in a fortnight. These three shipments could be worth as much as €5 million.
"I am looking back at five years of history, maybe there have been other cases where we have talked about tens or hundreds of kilograms, but I do not have that many in my memory," said Raimonds Zukuls, Deputy Director General of the VID for Customs.
The investigation is ongoing, but the Revenue Service hopes that the case could be handed over to the prosecutor within a few months. In the first shipment, all the people involved were Latvian citizens, while the next two shipments also involved citizens of Lithuania and a Central Asian country.
