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Guangdong provincial police department on July 4 joined hands with their Hong Kong counterparts and the two regions' customs in smashing a cross-boundary smuggling syndicate that used a 600-meter underground pipe to transport contraband goods from Hong Kong to Shenzhen. The officers arrested 12 suspects in the action and seized electronic products worth more than HK$8.2 million (yuan).
The smugglers used a 600-meter-long pipe 5.6 meters underground with a diameter of just 12 centimeters to ferry goods from Hong Kong to neighboring Shenzhen by attaching small packets to a cable wound and released by a power winch on either end of the hidden contraption to avoid police detection.
Guangdong police border guards stationed in Shenzhen received a tip at 8am on July 4 that some people were engaged in smuggling activities at a garbage transshipment facility at Luofang village in Shenzhen's Luohu (Lo Wu) district. The authorities immediately dispatched a team of detectives to the location investigate and informed the customs offices in both cities as well as their Hong Kong counterparts according to a joint-action protocol the two regions signed some time back.
The detectives were quite amazed to find at the scene the suspected smugglers had gone out of their way to ship the contrabands across the border, using advanced equipment to drill a horizontal hole 600m long and 5.6m beneath the ground that could not be seen with naked eye.
The Shenzhen end of the smuggling facility was hidden inside the rusted container, which had two compartments. One of the cubicles looked like a living quarter with a mattress for bed in it, but it was actually the cover of the underground setup.Underneath the cover was a pit about 1.8m deep, 2.9m wide and 3.4m long with a power winch installed in it to wind and apply a high-strength nylon cable through a 12cm-diameter PVC (plastic) pipe stretching 600m underground to a house in Hong Kong on the other side of the border fence for pulling packs of contraband items to Shenzhen. ■春生 資深翻譯員
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