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The good news is that a man who works in the port of Helsingborg was convicted today in a major drug case.
The bad part is that it would take 14 years to get here.
A man is sentenced to eight years in prison and another two to two years in prison each by the Helsingborg district court for involvement in a major drug racket.
It may appear to be rather trivial punishments in a case involving cocaine with a value of SEK 175 million on the street, but the smuggling attempt failed and the three are therefore only sentenced for various preparatory and attempted crimes.
The last word has not been said, but today’s sentence is undeniably a success in the fight against organized crime.
With the help of encrypted phones, two of the men, a dock worker and his friend, planned in detail the smuggling of cocaine from Ecuador to Helsingborg in 2020.
Two different projects was initiated, but the court considers that only one took such a concrete form that it is punishable.
However, the police had no idea of these plans. The breakthrough came instead with a seizure of 93 kilos of cocaine in Helsingborg in the fall of 2022.
The find did not lead to concrete suspicions against any person, but here was enough information to identify a container on its way from Ecuador on its way to Rotterdam for onward travel to Sweden.
In the Netherlands, the bags of drugs were exchanged for dummies before being sent on to Helsingborg.
At the same time, the police began to piece together puzzles and suspicions were soon directed at three Scanian talents.
Once in Sweden, the cargo was left standing for a while. But one evening, the customs criminal could see how two men in dark clothes broke into the container and then disappeared with part of the loot.
These two people then somehow managed to disappear, the police do not yet know who they are, but let’s avoid delving into that embarrassment.
Other things are worse. As if the now-convicted dockworker had been on the police’s radar for a long time, or at least should have been.
Already in 2010, the man was a suspect in the so-called broccoli operation.
106 kilos of cocaine were hidden in a load of frozen vegetables. The smuggling was discovered in Germany and the drugs were exchanged for granulated sugar before continuing to Helsingborg.
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Three dock workers were detained. Two of them were later sentenced to severe punishments, but the suspicions against the third turned out to be too weak.
According to today’s verdict, this man’s knowledge of the relatively large port was essential in the criminal plan.
Of course, he may have been innocent in 2010. Of course, it could be that he was unlucky enough to get caught the first time he tried his hand at drug dealing.
But he has been active all these years in a port that served as a gateway for cocaine smuggled into Europe.
A harbour in of which 1.3 tons were taken in less than a year and another eight tons were stopped on the way.
There may be deficiencies in the port’s security procedures.
