Biosecurity Nightmare | To Catch a Smuggler: South Pacific | National Geographic

Auckland International Airport welcomes over 350,000 visitors from the USA every year. Many bring dreams of a wonderful holiday, but this woman has brought a biosecurity nightmare.

"I've just seen the most incredible thing, a cat." And the lady says, "It's a live cat." That's a first for me. I've never seen that before. You can't bring a live cat into New Zealand. Not this way. Not through the x-ray. Um, that’s a huge biosecurity risk. I’m going to have to go; I’m going to talk to her now about it.

The cat and its American owner are separated immediately. Biosecurity Officer Demi quickly carries the cat to a secure lab to prevent the spread of any infectious diseases, while officer Phil confronts the owner. "I want to talk to you about the declaration side of things, alright? Because live animals coming into New Zealand are a big thing for us—diseases, obviously."

"Yeah, because it is an offense to bring, or attempt to bring, um, an item such as a live animal which is about as big as we get, into the country without declaring it."

The woman doesn't understand how serious this is. But Phil does. "There'll be no winners here."

Auckland’s International Mail Centre processes an amazing 7,000 parcels and packets every hour. Today, Customs officer Alannah is monitoring the mail belt when she spots an ordinary box just in from China. It’s declared as a doll, but out the back, Alannah thinks it might be more than that.

"So I have this parcel I found today at the belts. It’s declared a doll, but it definitely looks like there’s something inside here, so I’m going to open it up and take a look at it."

The declaration matches the contents, but on turning the toy over, Alannah notices tell-tale signs of tampering. "Quite a heavy doll, um, we can clearly see it’s been tampered with, very poor stitching which is actually coming undone."

Nobody wants to tear apart a toy for no good reason. So Alannah X-rays it one more time, looking at the X-ray image that appears to be contained within a sealed bag. "So I'm going to go ahead and cut it open and examine it."

It seems the game is up. The toy is hiding something, and after some work with a knife, Alannah finds a foil bag. "The packet concealed within the soft toy, it's quite heavy and quite a dense crystal-like substance."

"So, because we can’t test it here using the first defender, we will take it over to our secure exhibits room where we will be able to open it up and take a sample and test it in our— a secure safe environment."