Wonder dog a bone of contention for smugglers

A DUTCH dog called Flash has become a big bone of contention for Irish cigarette smugglers.

Dutch customs authorities announced yesterday that the eight-year-old black and white springer spaniel, helped by his buddy, Tazzle, and a crew of four other dogs, stubbed out a whopping half-billion contraband cigarettes which would otherwise have reached Ireland and Britain.

In recent years, Dutch-based Irish drugs dealers have added the trade in illegal cigarettes to their criminal portfolios, according to Dutch police sources.

Contraband goods such as cigarettes net huge profits with less risk than that associated with the drugs trade.

Flash& heads up a six-strong canine tobacco-busting team introduced by customs authorities in 1989 to sniff out the enormous quantities of smuggled cigarettes entering the EU, mainly through the port of Rotterdam.

Based at Rotterdam, Flash is thought over the years to have detected up to 400 million cigarettes hidden in containers, trucks and other hiding places, most of them bound for Irish streets.

“We reckon that since Flash was brought into service, followed by other members of the specially trained team, more than half a billion illegal cigarettes have been seized,” Dutch customs spokesman Kees Nanninga said.

“She is a real wonder dog, there is nowhere she won’t crawl or scrape through once she gets the whiff of tobacco; of course she would never touch the cigarettes, she just puts her teeth gently in the cartons, she’s been trained to know that tobacco damages your health,” he said.

And figures released by customs yesterday showed that of the 107 million smuggled cigarettes seized in the Netherlands last year alone, the dogs detected 82 million of them.

The dogs are estimated to have prevented €75 million being lost to the Dutch exchequer in recent years.

Customs officials said Ireland remains the favourite location for smuggled cigarettes because of “well-organised networks who distribute them north and south of the border and the high excise duty on legal brands which provides a ready market for retail”.

International investigations show that well over half the amount of smuggled cigarettes seized in the Netherlands were intended for sale illegally on Irish and British streets.

The Dutch fraud squad, however, have only managed to bring prosecutions in a handful of cases to date. One such trial involved a Real IRA cross-border smuggling operation in which Irish and Dutch suspects were arrested and brought to trial. Two Irishmen, one of whom is a relative of a Real IRA member, received short prison sentences in Zwolle in 2003 for their part in an international smuggling racket.