Smuggling of food, plants, animals up nearly four-fold

More trying their luck
Ong Dai Lin, Today Online 8 Aug 09;

HIS pockets were bulging unusually and he was behaving suspiciously. That was reason enough for Immigration and Checkpoints Authority (ICA) officers at the Singapore Cruise Centre to body-search the Singaporean.

What they found: 48 live "Burung Pipit" - a species of house sparrow - hidden away in small boxes, inside his trousers and a cloth pouch round his waist.

This incident in April was just one of 2,700 smuggling cases involving flora, fauna and food items in the first half of this year - a 275-per-cent increase from the same period last year, and the most such cases recorded so far.

An ICA spokeswoman said most of the offenders had misdeclared the items - which included potted plants and food flavourings - or did not know they had to obtain approval from the Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority.

In its half-yearly statistics released on Friday, the ICA said it saw a record 23,800 contraband smuggling cases, 35 per cent more than during the first six months of last year.

There was an 83-per-cent spike in security-related items smuggled - a record 3,300 cases - such as knuckle-dusters, live bullets and samurai swords.

Most were seized from persons who told officers they were bringing the items in as gifts or souvenirs.

The number of contraband cigarette packets recovered by ICA also spiked 87 per cent, to 734,000. But this was because most offenders were traffickers smuggling large quantities in - in terms of the actual number of cigarette smuggling cases, the figure fell 10.9 per cent.

When it came to pirated discs smuggled, however, the number of such cases detected rose slightly, though the number of discs seized fell by 57 per cent to 13,000.

The ICA said the culprits were "mainly travellers trying their luck against our checks".

Traffickers are using more ingenious methods to evade detection. For instance, two foiled contraband cigarette smuggling attempts this year saw traffickers pretending to offer tow truck services, towing broken-down buses through the checkpoints during peak periods.

As for immigration offences, the number of foreigners attempting to sneak into Singapore and stay here illegally, remained constant at about 3,100.

The number of people arrested for harbouring and employing immigration offenders has dipped for the third consecutive year, by 47 per cent and 63 per cent respectively.

The ICA attributed this to "greater community participation in public education programmes" on the consequences of such acts.