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Indian smugglers nabbed in Malaysia
Three Indian citizens, who tried to smuggle 13,000 pirated movie discs to Mumbai, were arrested in Malaysia.
Malaysian authorities have arrested three Indians trying to smuggle 13,000 pirated movie discs to Mumbai. They have also initiated lawsuits against landlords renting shops to vendors of illegal copies.
Iskandar Halim Sulaiman, deputy director of enforcement in the Ministry of Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs, said that the enforcement officials at Kuala Lumpur International Airport caught the three on Wednesday night.
The total value of the seizure was not immediately known.
A day earlier, enforcement officials at the same airport arrested several people after intercepting a shipment of about 8,000 discs, labelled as computer parts, destined for Johannesburg, Iskandar said.
Recent Hollywood releases such as Basic Instinct 2, Ice Age 2, and V for Vendetta appeared in both the Indian and South African shipments, officials said.
Malaysia is one of 36 countries on a US watch list of serious copyright violators, and music and movie industry have expressed concern over the prevalence of piracy in the country.
Iskandar said that authorities have seized around 1.5 million pirated DVDs, videodiscs and games worth US $14 million so far this year. More than 400,000 of them were bound for foreign markets.
The New Straits Times newspaper also reported that the Recording Industry Association of Malaysia is taking legal action against a mall operator in the eastern state of Pahang for leasing premises to vendors of pirated goods.
