French customs officers in the Somme department have dismantled an international counterfeit cigarette trafficking network after intercepting a single, continuous cigarette measuring 11 kilometres, which smugglers from Belgium intended to cut into individual units at a mobile slicing station near Amiens.
Twelve people were arrested in raids on 14 and 22 September following months of surveillance. According to the Amiens prosecutor's office, the network had perfected a method of rolling one enormous cigarette in a disused sugar beet factory, then transporting it by refrigerated lorry to distribution points across northern France. «We found the cigarette coiled inside a standard 40-tonne trailer,» a customs spokesman said. «It was still warm. They had been rolling it for six weeks.»
The operation required the smugglers to install a custom cutting rig, which sliced the cigarette into 2-centimetre segments at a rate of 900 per minute. Investigators say the ring had already supplied several tabacs in the Somme and Pas-de-Calais with what one officer described as «suspiciously uniform» cigarettes before the arrests.
Local residents in the village of Corbie reported that the sugar beet factory had been running its ventilation system continuously since August, and that the smell of unburnt tobacco had become «impossible to ignore» during Sunday mass. The mayor has requested that the remaining cigarette, currently stored in a customs warehouse in Amiens, be cut into commemorative keychains for the town council.
Belgian authorities have launched a parallel inquiry into the source of the raw tobacco, which is believed to have been imported from outside the EU in shipments labelled as «industrial insulation». A second rolling facility is suspected to be operating near the border, though customs officials admit they have «no idea how they would hide the smoke».