A British couple was arrested by customs officials at Paphos Airport on Wednesday after a search of their luggage revealed significant quantities of smuggled cigarettes, the Customs Department announced on Thursday.

The couple was released after they agreed to pay €12,900 in an out-of-court settlement.

The couple, aged 29 and 27, was scheduled to fly to Bournemouth, United Kingdom, with their four-year-old child.

However, customs noticed that the cigarettes in their three pieces of luggage – totalling 215 cartons, each with 200 cigarettes – were smuggled because the packages did not have the typical health warnings in Greek and Turkish, and they did not have “the security feature or the unique traceability code”, according to a press release.

The duty-free cigarettes mean they were not attained through legal means and no taxes were paid on them. Typically, the cigarettes would be subject to significant excise duties in both Cyprus and the United Kingdom, as the 43,000 total cigarettes is far above the United Kingdom’s personal allowance for travellers.

The couple’s luggage and its contents were confiscated before they were released with the €12,900 fine agreement.

In the same press release, the Customs Department also announced that pesticides were confiscated from a Greek Cypriot driver seeking to return from the north at the Astromeritis-Zodias crossing point on Wednesday.

The driver was found to have a 1,000-millilitre container of liquid pesticide and a 400-gram container of powdered pesticide during a routine inspection. The pesticides will be “destroyed in accordance with established procedures”, the press release said.