A Russian woman was caught by customs officers at Chelyabinsk Airport after flying in from Turkey with 577 grams of hookah tobacco in her luggage, the press service of the Urals Customs Administration reported.
Officers found ten packs of the tobacco, weighing 577 grams in total, as she went through customs control. A second passenger, also a Russian citizen returning from Turkey, was separately stopped with seven cartons of cigarettes that carried no excise stamps.
Administrative cases opened
Customs authorities opened administrative cases against both travellers for failing to declare goods and for breaching restrictions on importing tobacco products. The offence, non-declaration of goods, is treated in Russia as a customs violation rather than a criminal matter. The seized tobacco and cigarettes were confiscated and handed over for further investigation, the customs service said.
Under Russian customs rules, individuals may bring in up to 200 cigarettes or no more than 250 grams of other tobacco products for personal use without declaring them. Excise stamps show that tax has already been paid on tobacco goods, and products brought into Russia without them can be treated by customs as unlawfully imported. Both the tobacco and the cigarettes seized from the two travellers were far above the legal personal-use limit.
Hookah tobacco and travel from Turkey
Hookah tobacco, also known as shisha tobacco, is flavoured tobacco smoked through a water pipe and is widely sold across the Middle East, including Turkey. Chelyabinsk, a major city in Russia's Urals region, has direct flight connections to Turkey, one of the most popular foreign destinations for Russian travellers. The Urals Customs Administration oversees customs checks at airports and border crossings across the region as part of Russia's Federal Customs Service, the state body responsible for enforcing import and export rules at Russia's borders, including checks on undeclared goods carried by passengers.
Earlier smuggling case
The Urals Customs Administration also pointed to an earlier case in which foreign nationals arriving in Russia were caught with 12 cartons of imported cigarettes. The men said at the time that the cigarettes were intended for their own personal use.
