MORE than half a million smuggled cigarettes have been seized at Teesside Airport in a Customs and Excise crackdown.

The massive haul represents the biggest ever seizure of cigarettes from a single flight coming into the North-East.

Customs officers swooped in the early hours of Wednesday morning to x-ray all the baggage from a single flight arriving from Tenerife.

They found 48 suitcases full of cigarettes. A total of 557,400 cigarettes were seized, with a retail value in this country of just over £117,000.

Rob Hastings-Trew, customs spokesman for the North-East, said: "This was almost certainly some kind of organised operation.

"The way these goods were detected demonstrates that we are not prepared to sit back and allow organised gangs to flood the North-East with smuggled tobacco."

He said: "We are appointing an additional 13 officers to deal with the problem in the region and are mounting a massive new publicity campaign nationwide.

"In the first four months of this year, we have seized more than 15m cigarettes in the North-East."

No arrests were made in the Teesside swoop.

Officers restricted their actions to seizure of the goods, in line with current prosecution policy.

The seizure comes just as the Government announced a £3m publicity campaign, called Don't Be Blind to the Crime, to help stamp out tobacco smuggling.

Tobacco smuggling is calculated to have cost the British Treasury a total of £2.5bn last year.

Customs and Excise officers seized 1.7bn cigarettes last year.

Most of them were smuggled into the country in huge freight consignments.

Many of them come from China and the Far East, the Baltic, the Balkans and Southern Africa