Some insteresting stories of the unusual things that have been confiscated at customs.

• Customs officials at Miami Airport must have been rather taken aback when they discovered a 3,000-year-old Egyptian sarcophagus in a shipment from Spain in 2008.  Zahi Hawass, the then head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities travelled to the USA to collect the casket, which is thought to have been stolen over 100 years ago.

 

• Staff at Munich Airport got the shock of their lives when they discovered a head and skeleton in the luggage of two Italian women during a routing X-ray scan.  The women said the remains were those of a family member who had died in Brazil but wished to be buried in Italy.  After showing a valid death certificate which confirmed the man had died of natural causes the pair were apparently allowed to proceed.

 

• Illegal weapons are among the most commonly confiscated items at customs, but one cache seized from French citizens at the Swiss border also included a variety of masks.

 

• A 24-year-old was arrested at Sydney Airport in 2009 for attempting to smuggle four snakes and various types of lizard in his luggage.

 

• A passenger from Korea was stopped by officials at John F Kennedy Airport in New York in 2009 after it emerged that he was carrying two 100,000 dollar bills – a very rate note only printed in 1983, which never entered general circulation.  Unsurprisingly, they turned out to be fake.

 

• In 2008 at the Lewiston/Queenstown border crossing between Canada and the USA, a 50-year-old man from Barbados was stopped when officials became suspicious of the 100 vials of ‘holy water’ he claimed to be carrying.  They turned out to be full of liquid ketamine.

 

• You have to take your hat off to the smuggler who tried to take 70 live animals, including caiman crocodiles, in his luggage on a flight from Bangkok to Johannesburg in 2009.

 

• A decomposing monkey head was found by staff at Munich Airport in 2008 after they noticed an unpleasant smell coming from a package.

 

• In 2004, security at Denver Airport had the unsavoury task of dealing with the severed head of a seal, found in a biology professor’s bag.  The professor said that he had cut it off a dead animal and was planning to use it ‘for educational purposes’.

 

• In 2010, over 350 imitation Faberge eggs were uncovered at Charles de Gaulle Airport in France, having been smuggled over on a commercial plane from Russia.

 

• In 2005 a female passenger from Singapore was stopped at Melbourne Airport after officials found 51 live tropical fish hidden in plastic bags underneath her skirt.

 

• Customs officials in Britain intercepted a rather terrifying pair of Freddy Krueger-style claws at Coventry’s International Postal Hub.

 

• A gun-toting stuffed armadillo was sent all the way to Australia from Texas as a gift, but was seized at Sydney for breaching Australia’s strict laws on wildlife importation.  Officials at the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service joked in a statement that ‘bad taste should have had enough of a reason not to attempt to bring [it] into the country’.

 

• Police in Greece charged two US citizens with desecrating the dead in 2010 after finding six human skulls in their hand luggage as they prepared to leave the country.  Apparently, the tourists said they’d bought the skulls in a souvenir shop and thought they were fake. 

Thanks to Move One for the information.