Armed with a powered screwdriver, a crowbar and a handheld scanner, the Norwegian customs officers climbed up a tower of refrigerated containers. With the striking scenery of the Oslofjord behind them and the refrigerator fans whirring, they forced open the back of a sealed banana container from Costa Rica.
“You can 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 holding the fan and cooling vents, he added: “And on top you can fit multiple packages. If you had time to stick them in properly, you could get somewhere between 50 and 70 kilos.”
Every week, thousands of containers come through Oslo port – at least 100 of them carrying bananas, largely from Ecuador and Costa Rica. It is here that customs officials are fighting a so-called “cocaine tsunami” that is hitting Europe.
They are underfunded, understaffed and under-resourced – there is just one mobile scanner capable of analysing an entire container in one go, and it is shared between three ports. With dozens of border crossings taking place with neighbouring Sweden and Finland, Norwegian customs is fighting an almost impossible battle. As the EU tightens its border controls, it is feared that the non-EU country’s vulnerabilities are being exploited by criminals and its borders flooded with drugs shipments, many of which are thought to be going undetected.
Last year, the Norwegian customs service made 1,847 drug seizures – more than in the previous 10 years combined – including record quantities of cocaine.
In March last year, about 800kg of cocaine was seized from a banana warehouse in the Oslo suburb of Groruddalen, eclipsing the previous record for size of seizure several times over. A few weeks later, a further 900kg was found at the same place. And then in July, a further 600kg was uncovered. In total, more than two tonnes were seized at the warehouse.
Meanwhile, in April last year on the west coast of Norway, 150kg of the drug was found under a ship from Brazil. Customs said that criminals had intended to retrieve it using divers, but that it had been intercepted before they could get there.
It has since emerged that during the March seizure, customs officers 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 collect the drugs; Belgen says the port is regularly monitored by gangs.
“We know it’s being watched. You can pick any spot in the woods and see all over,” he said, pointing to the forested hillside overlooking the area where containers were being moved around by cranes and scanned.
On the ground, customs officers demonstrated how a container is checked. A cylinder containing coconut oil was found to have nothing additional inside it – if it did, air bubbles might have indicated bags of cocaine. Another container, this time rectangular and non-refrigerated, also passes through the X-ray.
“If I’m going to smuggle something, this door is the only way in and out,” said Belgen, pointing to the container’s hatch on the screen. “I will hide it in the bottom or furthest from the door.”
He pulled up a recent X-ray image of a banana container to demonstrate how they can be used to hide drugs packages, which often show up as black squares in the images.
Øystein Børmer, director general of Norwegian customs, said smugglers were exploiting legal ship traffic and legal goods to get drugs in. “We are also aware of the risk of Norway becoming a gateway to Europe from South America, as the EU puts in place stronger control measures to combat the same threat,” he said.
Customs, he added, was on the frontline of the problem. “Smugglers continuously change their modus operandi – and it is necessary, with a broad and dynamic response to this severe threat. If we focus our resources on one spot, the smugglers just move elsewhere.”
The mayor of Oslo, Anne Lindboe, has warned that the city is becoming “a preferred port in Europe for criminal, hardened gangs”. It was, she added, “slightly too poorly guarded”.
While scanning as many containers as possible seems like an obvious solution, Per Olav Sønju, head of Norwegian customs’ cargo section, said that could only happen when there were staff to operate the equipment, which was not always the case.
Even if the big scanner is available, it requires employees from the port, owned by Turkish port operator Yilport Holding, to lift the container with a crane and place it to be scanned.
“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.
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Drug smuggling, he said, was “rapidly increasing here in Oslo and Norway”, adding: “The challenge is that we are few people, we have minimal resources and we have not enough equipment.
“The people who are doing this kind of job are too badly paid, and the containers and the potential for smuggling is way too big compared to what we can achieve.”
While there had been an increase in the use of intelligence when it came to drug smuggling, nothing compared to physically being there, he said, and there were “big holes in the fence”.
The leader of Norway’s trade union for customs officials, Karin Tanderø Schaug, said gangs were using the poorly guarded land border between Sweden and Norway to move drugs around using snow scooters and sledges. “They are very creative and we don’t have the muscles to do much about it.”
Cross-border crime is increasingly becoming an issue across the Nordic countries. The justice ministers of Denmark and Sweden last week announced a joint initiative to try to prevent Swedish children being recruited by Danish gangs. And Norwegian police recently said Swedish gangs were operating across all of Norway’s 12 police districts.
Tanderø Schaug said there were fears that if Norway did not act forcefully and soon, it could end up in a similar situation to Sweden, where there are regular drug-related shootings, with children as young as 12 being recruited to commit violence.
“If we are not there [on 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. Police are worried.”
The border with Sweden is a growing source of concern for customs officials.
“What we are worried about is that Norway is becoming like Sweden because we have such a big border and Norway and Sweden are very tied together,” said Tanderø Schaug. “When something is being established in Sweden, it is naive to think it will never come to Norway.”
Customs was an essential part of tackling 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 showing itself in Norwegian society, she said, which has the third highest cocaine consumption in Europe among young adults. Even if the drug is not apparent at the border, because they do not have the tools to detect it, they know it is getting in: “We see it in society – in clubs, discos, parties.”
The solution, she said, was to have more staff and more scanners. “We have to have new customs officers and tools all the way along the border. Not only in Oslo, but on the coast and the border to Sweden.”
Skjalg Fjellheim, a minister in Norway’s treasury department, said the government had allocated 118m kroner (£9m) to strengthening customs work against drug trafficking in the revised 2024 budget and that the 2025 budget would bring the figure up to over 200m kroner.