Customs officials have seized a total of 9.9 million illegally imported cigarettes at business premises in Veenendaal near Utrecht on Thursday.

The cigarettes, from Lithuania, were sniffed out by trained ‘tobacco dogs’ but officials did not comment on what had put them on the scent in the first place. The cigarettes were in boxes labelled as containing biscuits.

The amount of tax owed on this number of cigarettes comes to around €2.4m, officials said. It is unclear if any arrests were made in connection with the find.

The cigarettes, which carried an English language health warning, will be destroyed.

Last December, European crime agency Europol said law enforcement authorities led by the customs departments of Lithuania and the UK had dismantled a Europe-wide cigarette smuggling gang, seizing 67 million cigarettes in the process.

And in October Dutch tax ministry inspectors and police closed down an illegal cigarette factory on a remote farmhouse in Gelderland, arresting 13 people from eastern Europe in the process.

That raid netted boxes containing 3.6 million cigarettes, 32 tonnes of tobacco, packaging material, filters and glue. Officials say the factory was capable of producing one million cigarettes a day.