Police arrested a cigarette smuggler who attempted to cross a river from Paraguay to Argentina while disguised as a water plant.
Officers dressed in military attire shone their flashlights on what appeared to be a “floating plant” moving toward their boat under the cover of darkness.
Their suspicions were confirmed when a closer inspection exposed the man beneath his clever disguise. An officer eventually pulled the hidden smuggler onto their vessel before placing him in handcuffs.
The smuggler was caught by gendarmes on the Paraguay/Argentina border. They then discovered he had been pushing 200 packs of ‘Rodeo King Size’ cigarettes in four black boxes under a flexible wire mesh covered with a mix of leaves and artificial plants and tied to his body.
The 42-year-old smuggler was checked over to make sure he wasn’t suffering from hypothermia or any other health problems before being taken to a police station for questioning ahead of a court appearance.
The wetsuit he was wearing is thought to have kept his body temperature higher than it would normally have been.
The bizarre incident occurred in the early hours of yesterday morning local time near Cerrito Island in the Argentinian Litoral region where the Paraguay and Parana Rivers meet.
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The man arrested had reportedly been trying to get the picture-postcard island from Paraguay when he was intercepted by officers from the Argentine Naval Prefecture.
A source told local press: ‘No-one had ever seen a plant like that floating so fast on top of the water-line and it made them take a closer look.’
The unnamed tobacco smuggler, dubbed Aquaman after the half-human American comic book superhero by social media users, is expected to appear before a judge in the northern Argentinian city of Resistencia later today.
