In late April, some traffickers from Changle in Fujian cooperated with their counterparts in Dalian to gather a group of 45 stowaways from Changle and Fuqing in Fujian, and Dalian. They planned to illegally send them abroad.

However, in early May, when the traffickers began to take action in Changle, they were detected by frontier public security forces. On May 3 and 4, all the stowaways and 15 traffickers were caught in hotels in Dalian, then sent back to where they had come from.

The security forces also had some success preventing smuggling. On May 1 in Quanzhou they found out that a cargo ship, alleged to contain smuggled goods, would pass by east China’s Zhejiang Province at about 6 am.

A police boat and two motorboats were sent to patrol the sea area. Two hours later, a cargo ship entered the area but suddenly turned away when it saw the police boats.

It even speeded up and attempted to shake off the police boats when it was told to stop for inspection.

After a 30-minute chase, the police caught the boat, on which were 18 containers of cars, such as Nissans and Bluebirds, and spare parts for such cars.

Police found that the cargo failed to coincide with the shipping list and they seized all the staff on board as well as the goods.

It emerged that the ship picked up the cars, worth about 4 million yuan (US$480,000), in Hong Kong on April 28 and was attempting to smuggle them into Zhejiang Province.

The public security forces in Fujian also solved several other cases involving cigarette smuggling.

(China Daily 05/10/2001)