The customs authorities in Qingdao, Shandong Province, recently cracked down on a smuggling ring that had been shipping seafood from waters contaminated by nuclear radiation around Japan's Fukushima.

Customs officials said that in the past two years, the suspects smuggled in more than 5,000 tons of high-end maritime products with a total value of 230 million yuan (US$34.5 million) from the contaminated waters off Japan.

The smuggling ring started to surface when customs officials noticed that high-end seafood native to Japan and the United States were being transported by vehicles bearing plates from Guangxi Province in South China, which borders Vietnam.

They later discovered that the suspects had shipped the seafood from Japan to Vietnam first before it entered China so as to evade inspections. The chain's mastermind, surnamed Wang, is living in the United States; he recevied the payments through underground banks that wired the money offshore.

After the 2011 Japanese earthquake that damaged the Fukushima nuclear power plant, almost all countries banned seafood imports from Fukushima.

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