In December last year, the Customs Service was alerted to two suspicious shipments from Poland. The packages turned out to contain close to 50,000 narcotic tablets and were addressed to two different assisted living facilities in southern Norrland.
“We then start a closer collaboration with the postal agents who sound the alarm when suspicious shipments arrive so we can spy on those who pick up the packages,” says Miriam Monsell, head of the investigation group at the Swedish Customs Administration’s criminal division North, in a press release.
Postal agents contacted about ten times about packages from Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic, which together contained hundreds of thousands of tablets.
In total, it turned out to be three men who took turns picking up the packages. One of them, a 35-year-old man, ran support homes for addicts in southern Norrland.
Wandered around Gävle
In February this year, three months after the investigation began, the man picked up a package in Söderhamn and headed south. He was followed by customs detectives who saw how he wandered around Gävle before he put on his hazard lights and stopped in a parking pocket along the E4 north of Älvkarleby.
The customs officials called the police who confronted the man and noticed that he was slurring his speech and acting strangely.
When they went through the car, they found needles, a toiletry bag with 240,000 Danish kroner and a soft drink can with a shredded driver’s license in it.
“Stolen and forged driving licenses are something that comes up again in our investigation. We have discovered six cases where completely innocent people have had their identities stolen by this league,” says Miriam Monsell.
Denies crime
In the same vein, a man of the same age was arrested with over 180,000 narcotic tablets in the car. He also had a fake driver’s license.
When the Swedish Customs Service later went through the mail history, they found 72 items from the same sender. Over half of them were addressed to the now-arrested man’s support apartments.
All three men who were seen picking up packages are now suspected of particularly serious drug offenses and particularly serious drug smuggling. They deny any crime.