*Duty officers in Khabarovsk Territory have halted a million-dollar smuggling racket. Two trainloads of valuable timber - beech, ash and oak - were being made ready for transport to China. It emerged that all these riches had been picked up cheaply from thieves. A report from Vladimir Voropayev. *The officers received information about unprecedented activity at the little railway station of Khor. Representatives of two export companies were buying up hundreds of cubic metres of timber here. *Three or four Kamaz trucks were coming here by night. *Organized criminal groups had set up this undercover business and in recent years the Russian timber mafia has been working with the Chinese. *[Unidentified officer from the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs Main Directorate in the Far East district, face not shown] There are citizens of the PRC who are in charge here. *To save time, the Chinese were buying up mixed timber, with the valuable woods mixed in with pine trees. The ash and beech were carefully picked out before dispatch. This resulted in two trainloads, almost 4,000 cu.m., and with all the paperwork necessary for export abroad. The criminals were able to "launder" the illegal freight easily and rapidly because the various regulatory bodies do not work together. For example, the customs are not interested in where and how the timber for export was felled, legally or not. *[Vladimir Chirkov, head of economic crime section of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs Main Directorate's anti-gangster department] They look at the paperwork from the exporting enterprise saying where the timber was purchased, from what company, but of course they don't actually check up on the company itself. *Even though they had the paperwork, this consignment of timber, worth around a million dollars, was seized. Criminal proceedings have been instituted concerning the knowingly illegal acquisition of timber. *Experts believe that as much as 5 per cent of the timber exported from the Far East is illegally produced. For a long time now criminal activity in the timber industry has been no less rife than in the gold and fisheries sectors. Annually the federal budget loses billions of dollars in revenue to the black export market in natural resources.