Man arrested by the police for disguising 48,000 beer cans as Pepsi

zainab quadri

November 13, 2015 5:57 PM

A man has been arrested after he attempted to smuggle 48,000 cans of beer into Saudi Arabia by disguising them with Pepsi labels.

Man arrested by the police for disguising 48,000 beer cans as Pepsi

The man was caught when he was about to cross the Al Batha border, when border control officers noticed something suspicious about his cargo.

The man was allegedly planning to take the beer into Saudi Arabia, where alcohol is banned.

Lebanon based TV LBCI quoted Al Batha border General Manager Abdulrahman al-Mahna as saying: "A truck carrying what first seemed to be normal cans of the soft drink Pepsi was stopped and after the standard process of searching the products, it became clear that the alcoholic beers were covered with Pepsi's sticker logos."

The story quickly went viral after being covered in local newspapers and shared on online news websites.

Footage of the security official's searching the cargo has also been posted on Twitter and shared thousands of times on social media sites.

This isn't the first time smugglers have gone to inventive measures to get alcohol into Saudi Arabia. Just a couple of months ago, a Saudi man was caught on the border with Bahrain with 12 bottles of liquor sewed into his trousers, and Saudi authorities recently said they found more than 19,000 bottles of alcoholic drinks hidden in a shipment of rice and tomato paste.

As silly as that sounds, the punishment for smuggling alcohol can be severe. Saudi citizens – and sometimes foreigners, too – can be sentenced to prison and floggings if they are caught.

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