Armed with power screwdrivers, crowbars and handheld scanners, Norwegian customs officers scaled the refrigerated container tower and, with a dramatic view of the Oslofjord as their backdrop and refrigerator fans spinning, pried open the back of a sealed container of bananas from Costa Rica.
“You can see right away how much space there is inside,” customs official Gard Bergen told the Observer during a port visit last week, pointing to the inside of the unit, which is equipped with fans and cooling vents, and he added, “And you can put multiple packages on top. If you pack it properly, you can fit around 50-70 kilos of stuff in it.”
Every week, thousands of containers pass through the port of Oslo, at least 100 of them loaded with bananas, mainly from Ecuador and Costa Rica, where customs officials are battling the so-called “cocaine tsunami” that is sweeping across Europe.
Norwegian customs is underfunded, understaffed and under-resourced. It has just one mobile scanner that can analyze an entire container at once, shared among three ports. Dozens of border crossings with neighboring Sweden and Finland force Norwegian customs into a near-impossible battle. As the EU tightens border controls, there are fears that criminals are exploiting weaknesses in non-EU countries, flooding the border with drug smuggling, much of it undetected.
Norwegian customs officials inspect a box of bananas imported from Ecuador. Photo: Fredrik Naumann/Panos/Observer
Last year, Norwegian Customs seized 1,847 drugs, more than the previous decade combined, including a record amount of cocaine.
Last March, some 800 kilos of cocaine were seized from a banana warehouse in Grolddalen, outside Oslo, several times larger than any previous record. A few weeks later, a further 900 kilos were found at the same site, and in July a further 600 kilos were found. In total, more than two tonnes were seized at the warehouse.
Meanwhile, 150 kilos of drugs were discovered underneath a ship from Brazil off Norway's west coast in April last year. Customs said the perpetrators had intended to use divers to retrieve the drugs, but they were seized before they arrived.
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It later emerged that customs officers had been watched during the March seizure by six Swedish men, some of whom are said to have links to the Swedish crime gang Foxtrot. Police believe they were there to retrieve drugs. Bergen has said the port is regularly watched by gangs.
“We know we're being watched. No matter what spot we pick in the forest, we can see everything,” he said, pointing to a forested hillside overlooking the area where containers are being moved by crane and scanned.
On the ground, customs officials demonstrated how they would inspect the containers. The cylinder of coconut oil was found to contain nothing inside; if it did, the air bubbles might indicate a bag of cocaine. Another container, this time rectangular and unrefrigerated, also passed the x-ray.
“If you're smuggling something, this is the only way in,” Bergen said, pointing to the container hatch on the screen. “You hide it at the bottom or furthest away from the door.”
He displayed recent X-ray images of banana containers and explained how they are used to hide drug packets, which often appear as black squares in the images.
Norwegian Customs Director General Øystein Bommer said smugglers were using legal shipping traffic and legal goods to bring drugs in. “As the EU introduces stronger control measures to counter the same threat, we are also aware of the risk that Norway could become a gateway from South America to Europe,” he said.
He added that customs was on the front line of the problem: “Smugglers are constantly changing their tactics and this serious threat requires a broad and dynamic response. If we concentrate our resources in one place, smugglers will simply move elsewhere.”
Drug trafficking is booming in the port of Oslo. Photo: Bloomberg/Getty Images
Oslo Mayor Anne Lindborg warned that the city was becoming “a port of choice for Europe's most violent criminal gangs”, adding that “policing is a bit too lax”.
While scanning as many containers as possible seems like an obvious solution, Per Olav Sonjju, head of cargo at Norwegian Customs, said that's only possible if there is staff to operate the equipment, which isn't always the case.
Even if large scanners were available, workers at the port, owned by Turkish port operator Ilport Holding, would have to use a crane to lift the containers and place them where they could be scanned.
“We can't do this all the time because we have too many containers,” he said, sitting at the kitchen table in the Norwegian Customs office in Oslo.
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He said drug smuggling was “growing rapidly here in Oslo and in Norway,” adding: “The problem is that we have few numbers, minimal resources and are poorly equipped.”
“The people who do this work are paid too little and the possibilities for containers and smuggling are too great compared to what we can achieve.”
While intelligence is increasingly being used when it comes to drug smuggling, it's nothing compared to actually being there and “there are big holes in the fence,” he said.
Karin Tandero Sjoeg, leader of Norway's customs officials' union, said gangs were taking advantage of the lightly guarded Swedish-Norwegian border to transport drugs around on snow scooters and sleds. “They're very creative and we don't have the power to deal with it.”
Cross-border crime is becoming a growing problem in the Nordic countries: the Danish and Swedish justice ministers last week announced a joint effort to prevent Swedish children from being recruited into Danish gangs, and Norwegian police recently said Swedish gangs are active in all 12 Norwegian police districts.
Tandero Sjoegh said if Norway did not take strong action quickly it risked ending up in a situation similar to Sweden, where drug-related shootings are common and children as young as 12 are being pushed into violence.
“If we weren't there (at the border), it would just be a free pass and it would spread through society,” she said. “Violence and weapons are on the rise in Norway. The police are worried.”
The border with Sweden is becoming a growing concern for customs officials.
“What we're worried about is that Norway is becoming like Sweden, because we have a very long border and we're very connected,” Tandero Sjoegh said. “When something is being established in Sweden, it's naive to think that it will never come to Norway.”
She said Customs was vital in tackling this: “It's important that we take this issue seriously and take action. We can make a difference in this fight and this threat.”
But she says the cocaine epidemic is already evident in Norwegian society, which has the third-highest youth cocaine consumption in Europe. Even if the drugs aren't visible at the border, they are known to be coming into the country because there is no way to detect them. “You see them in society – in clubs, in discos, at parties.”
The solution, she says, is more officers and scanners: “We need new customs officers and tools along the border – not just in Oslo, but on the coast and on the Swedish border.”
Norway's Finance Minister Skjällrg Fjellheim said the government had allocated 118 million kroner (£9 million) to strengthening customs action against drug trafficking in the revised 2024 budget, and that the figure would be raised to more than 200 million kroner in the 2025 budget.
