Norwegian border guards on the frontline in the fight against ‘cocaine tsunami’ | Norway

Armed with an electric screwdriver, a crowbar and a handheld scanner, Norwegian customs officers climbed a tower of refrigerated containers. With the striking landscape of the Oslofjord behind them and the whirring refrigerator fans, they forced open the back of a sealed banana container from Costa Rica.

“You get a glimpse of how much space there is inside,” customs officer Gard Belgen told the Observer during a visit to the port last week. Pointing inside the unit with the fan and cooling vents, he added: “And on top you can fit multiple packages. If you had the time to put them in properly, you could fit anywhere from 50 to 70 kilos.”

Every week, thousands of containers arrive through Oslo’s port – at least 100 of them carrying bananas, mainly from Ecuador and Costa Rica. Here, customs officials are battling a so-called “cocaine tsunami” hitting Europe.

They are underfunded, understaffed and under-resourced – there is only one mobile scanner capable of analysing an entire container at once, and it is shared between three ports. With dozens of border crossings with neighbouring Sweden and Finland, Norwegian customs are fighting an almost impossible battle. As the EU tightens its border controls, there are fears that the non-EU country’s vulnerabilities will be exploited by criminals and its borders will be flooded with drug shipments, many of which would go undetected.

Last year, Norwegian customs seized 1,847 drugs – more than in the previous 10 years combined – including record quantities of cocaine.

In March last year, approximately 800 kg of cocaine was seized at a banana warehouse in the Oslo suburb of Groruddalen, breaking the previous record for the size of the seizure several times over. A few weeks later, another 900 kg was found at the same location. And in July, another 600 kg was found. In total, more than two tonnes were seized at the warehouse.

Meanwhile, 150kg of the drug was found under a ship from Brazil off the west coast of Norway in April last year. Customs officials said criminals had planned to retrieve it using divers, but it was intercepted before they could get there.

It has since emerged that during the March seizure, customs officials were being watched by six Swedish men, some of whom have been linked to the Swedish criminal network Foxtrot. Police believe they were there to pick up the drugs; Belgians say the port is regularly patrolled by gangs.

“We know it’s being watched. You can pick any spot in the forest and look anywhere,” he said, pointing to the wooded hillside overlooking the area where containers were being moved by cranes and scanned.

On the ground, customs officials demonstrated how a container is inspected. A cylinder of coconut oil was found, containing nothing else – if it had, air bubbles could have indicated bags of cocaine. Another container, this time rectangular and not refrigerated, also passes the X-ray.

“If I’m going to smuggle something, this door is the only way in and out,” Belgen said, pointing to the container hatch on the screen. “I hide it at the bottom or furthest from the door.”

He produced a recent x-ray of a banana container to show how they can be used to conceal drug packages, which often appear as black squares in the images.

Øystein Børmer, director general of Norwegian Customs, said smugglers were exploiting legal shipping and goods to bring in drugs. “We are also aware of the risk of Norway becoming a gateway to Europe from South America, as the EU takes stricter control measures to combat the same threat,” he said.

Customs, he added, was on the front lines of the problem. “Smugglers are constantly changing their modus operandi – and that is necessary, with a broad and dynamic response to this serious threat. If we focus our resources in one place, the smugglers will simply go somewhere else.”

Oslo Mayor Anne Lindboe has warned that the city is “becoming a favourite haven in Europe for criminal, hardened gangs”, adding that the city was “a little too poorly policed”.

While scanning as many containers as possible seems like an obvious solution, Per Olav Sønju, head of the Norwegian Customs’ freight department, said this can only be done if there are staff to operate the equipment. And that’s not always the case.

Even if the large scanner is available, it will require port employees, who are owned by Turkish port operator Yilport Holding lifts the container with a crane and places it on site for scanning.

“There are too many containers to do this all the time,” he said, sitting at a kitchen table in the Norwegian customs office in Oslo.

The drug trade, he said, is “growing rapidly here in Oslo and Norway,” adding: “The challenge is that we have few people, we have minimal resources and we don’t have enough equipment.

“The people who do this kind of work are paid too little, and the containers and the smuggling potential are far too big compared to what we can achieve.”

While there was an increase in the use of intelligence when it came to drug trafficking, it was nothing compared to the physical presence on the ground, he said, and there were “big holes in the fence”.

The leader of the Norwegian customs union, Karin Tanderø Schaug, said gangs were using the poorly guarded land border between Sweden and Norway to move drugs using snowmobiles and sleds. “They are very creative and we don’t have the muscle to do much about it.”

Cross-border crime is becoming an increasing problem in the Nordic countries. The justice ministers of Denmark and Sweden last week announced a joint initiative to try to prevent Swedish children from being recruited by Danish gangs. And Norwegian police recently said that Swedish gangs were active in all 12 of Norway’s police districts.

Tanderø Schaug said there are fears that Norway could find itself in a similar situation if it does not take strong action soon, where drug-related shootings are common and children as young as 12 are recruited to commit violence.

“If we’re not there (at the border), it’s just a free pass and it will spread into society,” she said. “We have an escalation of violence and weapons in Norway. The police are worried.”

The border with Sweden is causing increasing concern for customs officials.

“What we are worried about is that Norway will become like Sweden, because we have such a big border and Norway and Sweden are very connected,” Tanderø Schaug said. “If something is set up in Sweden, it is naive to think that it will never come to Norway.”

Customs was a key part of addressing that, she said. “It’s important to take it seriously and act on it … we can make a difference in this fight and in this threat.”

But the prevalence of cocaine was already visible in Norwegian society, she said, which has the third highest cocaine consumption in Europe among young adults. Even if the drug is not visible at the border, because they do not have the means to detect it, they know it is coming in: “We see it in society – in clubs, discos, parties.”

The solution, she said, was to have more staff and more scanners. “We need new customs officers and tools all along the border. Not just in Oslo, but also on the coast and the border with Sweden.”

Skjalg Fjellheim, a minister at the Norwegian Ministry of Finance, said the government had allocated 118 million kronor (£9 million) to strengthening customs work against drug trafficking in the revised 2024 budget. This would increase to more than 200 million kronor in the 2025 budget.