Customs find eight drug shipments in a week at the Port of Rotterdam
Customs have made eight drug raids at the Port of Rotterdam in a short period of time. A total of 466 kilos of cocaine was seized, with an average wholesale value of around 11.5 million euros.
The Public Prosecution Service stopped calculating the street value of cocaine from the beginning of 2025 and will now only calculate the average wholesale value per kilo of cocaine.
The first find was on January 2 when customs officers checked a container with bananas from Costa Rica in it that was on its way to a Dutch company. An investigation was started after 50 packages were found in the cooling container.
The container was then put in a storage area for empty containers in Rotterdam after the regular cargo had been unloaded. A 20-year-old man from Amsterdam walked up to the container on January 4 and tried to open it. He was arrested and will be detained for two weeks at least.
Also on January 2, packages of liquid cocaine were found in a shipment of sugar syrup. The total amount was 550 kg of liquid in which an unknown amount of cocaine was dissolved. The sugar syrup had come from the Dominican Republic, and the shipment was to be delivered to a Dutch company.
Customs found drugs for a third time on the day when a container that had come from Suriname contained cocaine. Around 84 kilos of the drug was found in-between household goods and food. Two suspects from Boxtel, aged 24 and 25, were arrested for their role in the drug shipment.
Officers received an anonymous report on January 3 that a container was said to contain narcotics. An investigation revealed that the container, which had been loaded with bananas, had already been returned to an empty depot in Rotterdam. Around 47 packages containing cocaine were found near the cooling engine.
On Saturday, January 4, 2025, it happened again. During a customs inspection, a container turned out to contain 41 packages of cocaine. This load was also hidden in the refrigerator compartment.
The next such incident occurred on Monday, January 6. The HARC team had received information that narcotics were being hidden in the hold of a ship. The ship came from Colombia and was moored in the Botlek in Rotterdam. During an investigation by the National Customs Visitation Team, 130 packages of cocaine were found in the hold of the ship.
All the drugs that have been seized have now been destroyed.
