Sausages, cigars and porn - a wacky week at Dulles

STERLING, Va. - A woman hiding sausage in a children's puzzle box. A man carrying 66 bestiality and pornography DVDs. Children smuggling bottles of vodka.

They may sound like headlines splashed across tabloids at the supermarket checkout line, but they're just some of the items recently seized by Customs and Border Protection at Dulles International Airport.

With more than 3 million people passing through customs at Dulles each year, officers are bound to see a few strange items.

This past week was no exception.

Some of the more usual items that were seized came from a traveler from Peru who tried to bring 66 bestiality and pornography DVDs into the country on Wednesday. On Sunday, officers seized four child porn DVDs from a traveler arriving from Japan.

Meat products were popular items among people flying into Dulles this week:

• On Saturday, officers found two sausages in a shrink-wrapped puzzle box that a woman from Amsterdam had declared as a child's gift. The woman was fined $500.

• A traveler from Ethiopia was fined $300 for attempting to smuggle five pounds of dried beef hidden inside a dry bread package -- also on Saturday.

• A woman carrying four pounds of pork sausage from the Netherlands was fined $300 on Saturday for repeatedly failing to report the meat.

• On Thursday, a man from Vietnam was fined $175 for failing to declare six packages of pork sausage -- even after CBP officials offered him several opportunities to change his declaration.

A traveler arriving from Paris had 34 Cuban cigars - including 25 Petit Cazzadores - taken away by officers on Thursday.

Two people - including a minor - were busted for bringing bottles of Absinthe without an Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau-approved label in from Europe. Another minor was caught trying to bring in two bottles of vodka from Germany on Wednesday.

A woman who arrived from London on Sunday had $34,700 seized after repeatedly refusing to declare $35,000 in U.S. currency she was hiding in her bag. Officers gave her a $300 humanitarian release, and she will have to file a petition to get the rest of her money. Travelers carrying more than $10,000 in U.S. currency equivalence must declare the amount.

The most serious offense was the arrest of a 40-year-old Colombian man traveling from Panama who was charged with importing five kilograms or more of cocaine into the country.

Officers also arrested four people with outstanding warrants from Montgomery, Fairfax, Arlington and Loudoun counties.

During the 2008 fiscal year, CBP officers arrested 111 passengers on arrest warrants from local, state and federal jurisdictions and issued 172 civil penalties for failure to declare prohibited agriculture products.

"The two most important lessons that travelers should learn from these seizures are to understand which products travelers may legally bring into the United States, and that our officers and agriculture specialists are experts at identifying suspect passengers and detecting prohibited items," Christopher Hess, CBP Port Director for the Port of Washington, said in a written release.

For more information about what you can and cannot bring into the U.S., visit CBP's "Know before You Go" Web site. U.S. citizens and foreign travelers can see more travel-related information at CBP's Travel site.

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