Customs officers at Ho Chi Minh City’s Tan Son Nhat International Airport have arrested a Vietnamese man accused of smuggling four rhino horns into the country on Sunday.

The 42-year-old man was returning to Vietnam from Africa, according to the customs office. His luggage was checked and found to be carrying four rhino horns, which were cut into pieces and hidden in milk boxes.

The contraband, which weighed nearly 2 kilograms in total, were estimated to worth around 4.5 billion VND ($A260,000) on the Vietnamese black market.

The investigation is ongoing.

The rhino horn trade was banned globally by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) in 1977.

International conservation groups have identified Vietnam and China as the world’s two major consumers of rhino horns, a charge the two countries have refuted.

Vietnam has outlawed the commercial use of rhinoceros horn, which is composed largely of the protein keratin, the chief component in human hair and fingernails.

The trade has been fuelled by a misguided belief in its supposed medicinal properties, including its ability to cure cancer. Many also flaunt the horns as a status symbol.

The Javan rhino was confirmed extinct in Vietnam in 2010.

– with VnExpress