More than 60 million contraband cigarettes - a record number - were confiscated by the Customs Department from seven containers on two cargo ships at the Freeport in Birżebbuġa.

It would take a man smoking a packet a day over eight thousand years to go through them.

The department said the haul of three million cigarette packets came from the two ships in an operation carried out by the Customs Enforcement Section, which connected the seven containers throughout its investigations.

The cigarettes, which originated from outside the EU, would be worth about €12 million in taxes.

In the whole of last year, 1.1 million contraband cigarettes and about 2,500 bottles of alcohol were confiscated by the department.

A record amount of drugs was discovered by the department last year: 19.4 kilograms of cocaine, 7.5 kilograms of heroin and 9,975 pills of ecstasy.

This week, a new mobile container scanner was inaugurated at the Customs Warehouse at the Freeport, which however was not used in this operation.

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.