Massive stash of cocaine found hidden in banana shipment — again

Employees at a Norwegian fruit distributor were stunned when they discovered a packet of cocaine in a box of bananas, alerting customs officials who found a stash of 147 kilos, they said Monday. The seizure marked the latest in a string of incidents involving cocaine being found hidden in a shipment containing the fruit.  

The haul, found in nine boxes of bananas on April 3, is believed to have a street value of 170 million kroner ($16.4 million) and is the biggest in the Scandinavian country since 2023, when a total of 2.3 tons were found, Norwegian Customs said in a statement.

A dozen pallets of bananas had recently arrived at the warehouse and were being inspected with scanning equipment, and the scanned image “showed irregularities in some of the boxes on the pallet,” officials said, noting that customs officers also conducted a dog search.

The drugs were smuggled by sea from South America and then on a trailer through Sweden, though they were probably not intended for the Norwegian market.

“There is concrete information that suggests the cocaine was to be picked up at the Antwerp port, based on information through international cooperation with Europol and Belgian authorities,” the statement said.

Customs official Tim Gurrik said a large criminal network was likely behind the attempted smuggling.

“A seizure of such magnitude requires a great deal of financial and organizational muscle that only larger criminal networks have the ability to carry out,” he said.

“We see that the criminal networks behind the smuggling are willing to take risks and are adaptable.”

Cocaine has been found concealed in banana shipments many times across the globe in recent months.

Last December, authorities in the Dominican Republic confiscated nearly 9.5 tons of cocaine from a banana shipment at the country’s most important seaport. 

In August 2024, customs agents seized more than 200 pounds of cocaine at the port in Greece from a ship carrying the fruit. The month before that, police dogs in Ecuador helped find more than six tons of cocaine hidden in a banana shipment headed to Germany.

In March last year, Bulgarian customs officials confiscated about 170 kilograms of cocaine from a ship transporting bananas from Ecuador.

The month before that, British authorities said they found more than 12,500 pounds of cocaine hidden in a shipment of the fruit, breaking the record for the biggest single seizure of hard drugs in the country.

In August 2023, customs agents in the Netherlands seized 17,600 pounds of cocaine found hidden inside crates of bananas in Rotterdam’s port. Three months before that, a police dog found 3 tons of cocaine stashed in a case of bananas in the Italian port of Gioia Tauro.