Airport officials often find weapons, drugs or other prohibited items in the luggage of passengers. The smugglers are then arrested and their processing is usual. But the stories of some officials are so bizarre that they are hard to believe and the resourcefulness of the smugglers is out of this world. 

Recently, a man was stopped at an airport in Australia who tried to fool the customs officials by smuggling two pigeons up his trouser legs. What happened to the pigeons is unknown, but the man ended up being questioned by police.

Customs officials in Melbourne’s airport found exotic fish worth 30,000 dollars in the vest of a smuggler. The fish were placed in water-filled plastic bags.

That’s not all. Last October a woman walked with banana plants in her underwear at the Sydney airport, while in Edinburgh, police stopped a man who had swallowed as many as 129 packets of cocaine.

Smuggling dead bodies 

Some smugglers opted for some less hazardous means of smuggling drugs, so they hid the drugs in shoes or wigs.

One resourceful man hid as many as 52 parrot eggs under his shirt and ended up in prison for three years. A man arrested in Bangkok had among his luggage various reptiles, including two pythons. A smuggler arrived in Australia with a packet of cocaine wedged between two skateboards.

A man from South Africa stored a kilogram of cocaine in his underwear. More bizarre were those who hid drugs in stuffed cats or in frozen monkey heads.

But the jackpot definitely goes to customs officials of the JFK airport who were, to put it mildly, shocked when they realised that a dead man had come out of a plane in a wheelchair. His Chilean family tried to smuggle the body so they would not have to pay for the transport of a corpse.