Charming penguin contributions to B -> K pi - art. no. 014029

We present calculations of the charming-penguin long-distance contributions to B --> K pi decays due to intermediate charmed meson states. Our calcula tion is based on the chiral effective Lagrangian for light and heavy mesons , corrected for the hard pion and kaon momenta. We find that the charming-p enguin contributions increase significantly the B-->K pi decay rates in com parison with the short-distance contributions, giving results in better agr eement with experimental data.