2023-06-19 10:09:13
The customs officers at Vienna Airport recorded more than 4,000 seizures during 45,000 checks in the 2022 travel year. Cigarettes, groceries and jewelry were the top smugglers confiscated, Finance Minister Magnus Brunner (ÖVP) said at a press conference on Monday. The number of seizures increased sharply in 2021, but there were also significantly fewer passengers on the road at the time due to the corona pandemic.
“Last year’s customs balance sheet at Vienna Airport shows a clear trend. The number of smuggling attacks at Austria’s largest airport is once more increasing significantly. This was observed in 2021 and increased in 2022. Our customs officers use their experience and risk analyzes to control things and with technical and animal support in a targeted and extremely successful manner,” said Brunner.
In 2022, following the years of the corona pandemic, operations at Vienna Airport were largely back to normal. Compared to the pre-crisis level (Vienna Airport counted around 31.5 million passengers in 2019), there is still a slightly lower number of arrivals and departures, with around 23.6 million travelers in 2022, the passenger volume has increased compared to 2021 (around 10.3 million) but more than doubled. This is also reflected in the number of seizures: in 2021 there were around 3,000 out of around 38,000 controls.
In 2022, the most common illegal holiday souvenirs in the suitcases of people passing through or entering the country were food of animal origin or plants, the import of which does not comply with animal health or plant protection regulations. Their total weight was more than 14 tons.
In the case of illegally imported cigarettes, on the other hand, there was an opposite trend: while 815,846 cigarettes were discovered in the corona year 2021, in 2022 there were just under 500,000. According to customs experts, this is mainly due to changes in smuggling routes.
Customs officers also seized jewelry and luxury watches with a total value of around three million euros in passengers’ luggage. A 43-year-old traveler from Istanbul stood out here, who tried to import a suitcase in February 2022 – filled with 18 kg of gold jewelry worth almost 700,000 euros.
The illegal import of medicines also played a role at the airport: For example, a 28-year-old traveler who was coming from the USA via Madrid and was trying to import more than 10,000 doping-like preparations into Austria was stopped. More than a kilogram of caviar, 16 hard corals, 29 porcupine quills, five bottles of snake wine or two “hunting trophies” in the form of giant wild sheep horns – a species under protection – were discovered by the targeted controls at the airport.
In 2022, 55,360 goods exports and 92,331 goods imports were processed in freight traffic at Vienna Airport. In the course of the control activity, the teams picked up around three tons of medicines in freight shipments – the majority of them: 45,000 packs of sexual enhancers. 545 e-scooters, 500 stuffed animals, 40,500 dental splints, 450 kg of disinfectant, 100 kg of Covid antigen tests and more than 6,000 electrical devices with missing or incorrect CE marking were also transported illegally.
In a total of 134 cases, the controls led to the seizure of drugs. In 2022, that was a little more than 37.5 kg of different drugs and 659 narcotics in tablet form. The top smuggled illegal substance was cannabis in various aggregate forms, such as 16 kg of herbal cannabis, which customs teams found in April 2022, of all places, in an airline’s Lost and Found warehouse.
According to Brunner, the number of seizures is likely to increase once more in 2023. In the period from January to April 2023, the number of passengers (up 64 percent), the number of checks (up 43 percent) and the number of arrests (up 50 percent) increased compared to the same period in the previous year.
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