Four men who celebrated end of orienteering event with 15-minutes crossing likely to be charged with border offences

Four British tourists who were detained in Finland after illegally crossing the border into Russia to knock back a few beers are expected to face charges.

The unidentified men, who had been competing in an orienteering event in south-east Finland, were driving back to the nearby town of Joensuu when they decided to take a 46-mile (75km) detour to the border, state broadcaster Yle reported.

The men, who have been allowed to return to Britain, parked their car by the side of the road and made their way on foot across the Finnish border zone and into Russia, where they celebrated their achievement with a beer or two.

“They were on the Russian side for maybe 15 minutes. Across the border they had drunk several cans of beer,” the lead investigator of the Finnish border guards’ crime prevention unit, Timo Häkkinen, told the broadcaster.

The 800-mile Finnish-Russian border mostly runs through sparsely populated forest and is protected on both sides by border zones between o.6 miles and 4.4 miles deep that that require a permit to enter.

There is heavy electronic surveillance on the Finnish side, concentrated mainly on the southern end of the border. Crossing is allowed only at official checkpoints where most travellers must present at least one visa.

Having spotted their parked car, a guard patrol picked up the men when they crossed back into Finland and detained them on suspicion of border offences, Häkkinen said.

The four – who admitted to illegally crossing the border – said they had seen and understood the many multilingual warning signs approaching and inside the border zone, but had decided to press on and cross the border because they were “strongly tempted to go to Russia”.

A Finnish prosecutor is expected to charge the men with border offences, which generally carry a fine. Häkkinen said they were fortunate to have been detained where they were, rather than across the border.

“If Russian border guards had come across the men in Russia, they would have been detained there to answer for their deeds,” he said.

The offence was the second such incident in a week. Ilta Sanomat neswpaper reported that four young Germans on a Finnish adventure holiday were briefly detained in Savonlinna after also illegally crossing the border to spend “about six minutes” in Russia.

Häkkinen told the paper the excitement of being close to Russia had plainly proved too much for the group. “If the Russians had found them, their stay would have been quite a bit more adventurous,” he said.

