Snow White nearly died from them. Trick-or-treating children once found razors in them. Now an ingenious gang of drug smugglers has been busted for stuffing them – yes, apples – with $14 million worth of heroin and driving them by truck from Kyrgyzstan to Russia, local news reports say.
Security officials in the major Siberian city of Novosibirsk announced this week that they have interdicted more than 82 kilograms of heroin “packed in spherical containers made of foamed plastic and disguised as apples. They were transported together with real fruit,” a spokeswoman for the regional branch of Russia’s main intelligence agency, the Federal Security Service (FSB), was quoted as saying. Officials suspect the smack-packed shipment reached Russia from Kyrgyzstan via Kazakhstan, two Central Asian countries that claim to be the apple’s birthplace.
The major bust, preceded by a months-long joint investigation by the FSB and Russia’s Customs Service, resulted in the arrest of an unspecified number of people from different countries, news agencies reported. A search for the smugglers’ coconspirators continues.
Russian officials have long complained that opiates from Afghanistan have been flooding the country and fueling an epidemic of drug use. But impoverished, formerly Soviet Central Asian countries like Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, whose porous borders and proximity to Afghanistan have turned them into principal transit routes, have increasingly been suffering from the drugs themselves, both in terms of criminal activity and addiction. On March 30, a leading specialist from Kyrgyzstan’s Health Ministry told Regnum.ru that the number of drug users in the country has been rising steadily, most of them preferring opiates such as heroin; the officially registered number of addicts, she said, has inched up from 9,730 in 2009 to 10,171 in 2010.
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