Record Amount of Heroin Seized at Bulgarian-Romanian Border

The narcotic substance was found in a cargo truck with terracotta tiles delivered to a warehouse in Bulgaria from Iran, according to Standart newspaper, cited by BNR.

The tiles with a total weight of 23 tons travelled from Bulgaria to Holland.

The truck with the terracotta was stopped for a check by the team of the Customs in Lom on the Dunav.

The driver, a Bulgarian national, produced the transport papers for the export. Customs officers found that the sender was exporting this kind of commodity for the first time. The company in Holland named as the recipient of the terracotta turned out to be trading in alimentary goods.

This made customs officers doubt about the case and they started unpacking tile boxes. In 17 of them they found 400 nylon bags with compressed heroin with exceptional purity 70%.

Its value based on evaluations of the judicial system is EUR 32M.

Trud newspaper quotes Prosecutor Sotir Tsatsarov as saying that the narcotic substance was reloaded in Bulgaria as a way to interrupt the connection with the starting point of the delivery, namely Iran.

''Criminals are getting cleverer'', Tsatsarov has told the newspaper, and has added that investigation should not stop after the interception of the drug so that the sender, recipient and all participants along the trafficking chain have been identified.

Trud quotes the CEO of the Customs Agency Georgi Kostov who has said ''This is the result of out efforts in 2015 when the inter-department anti-smuggling coordination center was established''