Eagle-eyed customs officers at Nepal’s Kathmandu Tribhuvan International Airport have arrested a man with 1kg of gold concealed inside his rectum.

The Chinese national, named by the Himalayan Times as 22-year-old Sa Luitui, was pulled to one side by security workers at the airport after they noticed he was walking in a peculiar fashion.

Having arrived on a Tibet Air flight from China, the man was asked to pass through an x-ray machine after his discomfort was noticed by officers at the arrivals gate.

Once he had walked through the machine, it was determined he was carrying a quantity of metal concealed inside his body.

When questioned, he admitted he had inserted gold up his backside.

He was taken to a local hospital where doctors extracted the gold, which had been placed inside a condom.

One end of the condom was left sticking out of the man’s rectum to aid retrieval of the contraband.

The man’s bungled smuggling attempt comes after two other Chinese nationals were caught trying to enter the country through the same airport with undeclared gold.

Last Thursday, Chen Qinghuang and Chen Zhaoyang were apprehended while carrying 8kgs of gold through Tribhuvan.

Local police said gold smugglers have recently been using new methods to sneak gold through Nepal’s only international airport, with increasing numbers concealing the precious internally, or hiding it inside laptops or the soles of their trainers.

In May 2016, the BBC reported that a man has been detained at Bangladesh’s Dhaka Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport for attempting to smuggle 600gs of gold bars he had inserted into his rectum.

While the dangers of inserting drugs into the anal cavity are relatively well known, attempting to smuggle items that pose no risk of causing damage by being absorbed into the body can also cause serious injury.

Severe damage can be caused to the rectum while either attempting to insert or extract items such as gold.

Last month, it was reported that Russian guards working on the country’s border with China had arrested a woman for attempting to smuggle gold discs taped to the bottom of her feet.

The 27-year-old Russian national was taken to one side by customs officers after they noticed she was walking in a strange manner.

Back in October, a man was detained at India’s Cochin International Airport after security workers discovered he was attempting to sneak gold into the country hidden under a wig.

Europol has confirmed that an investigation conducted by a coalition of law enforcement agencies across the globe has resulted in the closure of major dark web contraband emporium Wall Street Market.

An operation involving police from Germany, the Netherlands and the US resulted in the arrests of three men suspected of being the main operators of the site, as well as the seizure of cash and cryptocurrency worth millions of dollars.

The arrests come after a linked investigation carried out by Finnish customs officials and police in France earlier this year resulted in the closure of Silkkitie, which also went by the name of the Valhalla Marketplace.

Wall Street Market, which is thought to have been the world’s second-largest dark web marketplace, had over 1.1 million users and 5,400 vendors, the latter of which used the platform to offer contraband including drugs, weapons, cyber crime tools, stolen credit card and identity information, and even the services of underworld hitmen.

German nationals Tibo Lousee, Jonathan Kalla and Klaus-Martin Frost were arrested following a number of raids on properties that were thought to be linked to the site, with investigators in the US last week charging them with running the site.

One of Wall Street Market’s vendors who is alleged to have offered methamphetamine by the kilo is also said to have been charged with drug offences as a result of the operation.

It was reported last month that the operators behind the site had pulled an exit scam, diverting an estimated $11 million held in escrow by site users to their personal accounts before closing the platform down.

The site’s administrators took a commission of up to 6% on every sale made on the platform.

In a statement, Europol Executive Director Catherine De Bolle commented: “These two investigations show the importance of law enforcement cooperation at an international level and demonstrate that illegal activity on the dark web is not as anonymous as criminals may think.”

US Assistant Attorney General Brian Benczkowski said: “This operation sends a crystal-clear message: dark markets offer no safe haven.

“The arrest and prosecution of the criminals who allegedly ran this darknet marketplace is a great example of our partnership with law enforcement authorities in Europe, with the support of Europol, and demonstrates what we can do when we stand together.”

Wall Street Market is the latest in a string of dark web marketplaces to be closed down over the course of the past year, with investigators across the globe increasingly taking action against buyers and vendors who have used these platforms as well as the administrators who run them.

Download a hi-res version of our new infographic here

The European Union is set to implement a system to track and trace tobacco products all along the supply chain this May, in line with the Tobacco Products Directive it passed in 2014. According to EU officials, the scheme meets a mandate from the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) Protocol to Eliminate Illicit Trade in Tobacco Products, to which the EU is a party.

Track and trace systems have the potential to be vital tools in the fight against the illicit tobacco trade. Under-the-table smokes are “the commodity of choice” for organised crime groups, deprive governments of badly-needed tax revenue, and undermine public health initiatives by making tobacco products available at cheap prices, most importantly to highly price-sensitive groups such as young people.

The EU is by no means immune to the parallel trade in tobacco products, which costs the bloc’s governments an estimated €10 to 20 billion a year; illicit smokes make up roughly 10% of European consumption. What’s more, in some areas of the Union, the situation is getting worse. Tobacco smuggling across the Lithuanian-Belarusian border nearly doubled in 2018, and there are grave concerns a no-deal Brexit could lead to rampant illicit trade across the Irish border.

Parliamentary dissent

Against this backdrop, the May rollout of the EU’s track-and-trace scheme is welcome news. Unfortunately, the system the European bloc is planning to implement has already drawn substantial criticism from MEPs and public health bodies, who argue that the scheme is not  independent from the tobacco industry. The WHO Protocol specifies any track-and-trace system must be clearly separate from the tobacco sector’s influence; tobacco manufacturers’ long history of obstructionism and complicity in the smuggling of their own products indicate that they simply can’t be trusted. As recently as 2014, British American Tobacco (BAT) was fined in the UK for deliberately oversupplying overseas markets which it knew would make it into the hands of smugglers.

These various concerns underpinned Romanian MEP Cristian-Silviu Busoi’s January seminar on how to stamp out the parallel tobacco trade. Another, similar, debate will be held on Wednesday, February 27^th, helmed by MEP Younous Omarjee. Both Busoi and Omarjee are suggesting that the Tobacco Products Directive may need to be modified in order to ensure the EU’s track-and-trace scheme is made compliant with the WHO Protocol, a higher legal norm, and does not unduly entrust responsibilities to the tobacco industry.

As Omarjee’s stated in a press release, the MEP “wants to understand why the European Commission is going out of its way to entrust the fight against the parallel trade in tobacco, fed by cigarette manufacturers, to the tobacco lobby and people close to it.”

The WHO’s approach

NGOs present at the January seminar, from the European Network for Smoking Prevention to the European Cancer League (represented by prominent anti-tobacco activist Luk Joossens), agreed that among the many key changes to the Directive would include making sure that data storage providers are not selected and paid by tobacco manufacturers. The International Tax Stamp Association (ITSA), which has challenged the EU system before the European Court of Justice on the grounds that it is in breach of the WHO Protocol, agreed that, among other things, any track and trace system should be placed under the protocol signatories’ direct control. Against the backdrop of this plethora of concerns, the European Commission representative at Busoi’s conference noted that the EU system is up for review in 2021.

Our exclusive new infographic illustrates the shortcomings of the EU track & trace system. Leaving aside the security features aspect of the system, which is controversial in and of itself, the infographic highlighting its numerous discrepancies with the scheme provided for by the WHO Protocol.

The WHO calls for a logical, linear process in which it defines a set of requirements for the Protocol’s parties to enforce. A public, open and competitive tender by the parties to the Protocol is supposed to select the best service providers, entirely independent from the tobacco industry, which then take on the key missions of “track and trace”: generating unique identifier codes, printing or affixing these codes to tobacco products, verifying on the production line that the codes are linked to the right products and providing governments with a database and related alert system. Public authorities, including customs, police forces and the judiciary, then have the means to control tobacco products all along the supply chain and convict those responsible for illicit trade.

Europe’s problematic alternative

In contrast, the European system is highly convoluted. Member states only carry out tenders for the service providers charged with generating the codes, while the European Commission oversees the selection of database providers. Most problematically, the EU scheme requires the tobacco manufacturers to both affix and verify the codes in their factories—two of the most essential steps of tracking and tracing tobacco products. The industry also has a hand in selecting and remunerating both the data storage providers and the auditors intended to oversee the system.

Under this scheme, unlike that outlined by the WHO, separate databases are required, while tobacco manufacturers each select their own preferred partners for data storage, which transfers its data to the secondary repository for public authorities. The involvement of the tobacco industry and its network of preferred suppliers in three of the four core missions in the EU proposal understandably raise serious doubts about whether the data generated by the system will truly be objective, and whether its use by judicial authorities will be efficient in tackling the illicit tobacco trade.

EU Health Commissioner Vytenis Andriukaitis has underlined that tobacco consumption is the single biggest cause of avoidable death in the EU, and expressed his hope that the implementation of track and trace would help Brussels crack down on the illicit trade which furthers it. Unfortunately, as it stands, the EU proposal falls short of what’s needed to effectively regulate the sector —and fails to fulfil the bloc’s obligations under the WHO Protocol.