German police seize cocaine worth billions in biggest ever bust

Your support helps us to tell the story

Support Now

Find out moreClose

As your White House correspondent, I ask the tough questions and seek the answers that matter.

Your support enables me to be in the room, pressing for transparency and accountability. Without your contributions, we wouldn't have the resources to challenge those in power.

Your donation makes it possible for us to keep doing this important work, keeping you informed every step of the way to the November election

Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

German investigators have said that they seized cocaine worth 2.6 billion euros ($2.78 billion) from several container ships and arrested seven people in what they called the biggest ever find in the country.

Prosecutors in the western city of Duesseldorf said they confiscated the 35.5 metric tons of cocaine last year following a tip from Colombian authorities. They added they found 25 tons of cocaine in the port of the northern city of Hamburg, another 8 tons in the Dutch port of Rotterdam and almost 3 tons in Colombia. The drugs were hidden among vegetables and fruit.

The drug seizures had not previously been announced.

The suspects — aged between 30 and 54 — were arrested in recent weeks and are believed to have been behind the smuggling. The seven include German, Azerbaijani, Bulgarian, Moroccan, Turkish and Ukrainian nationals, the prosecutors said in a statement. Their identities were not given in line with German privacy rules.

A businessman from the western German state of North Rhine-Westphalia set up 100 letterbox companies to make the transports appear legal, they said.

“Specifically, the suspects are accused of organising the transport of 10 sea containers with large quantities of cocaine from Latin America to Europe in the period from April to September 2023 with other as yet unknown accomplices allegedly residing in Turkey via front companies set up for this purpose,” a written statement by prosecutors said.

The state justice minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, Benjamin Limbach, praised the huge cocaine seizure at a news conference in Duesseldorf.

“This is a blow to international organised criminality," Limbach said. "It’s a precise punch in the jaw that hurts the drug lords.”

In May this year more than 600kg of cocaine concealed in bananas that were due to be sent off to Germany were seized by authorities in Colombia.

Footage published on X/Twitter by William Rene Salamanca Ramirez, director general of Colombia’s national police, on Sunday, 26 May, showed authorities making the discovery at the port of Santa Marta, north of Cartagena.

The police chief said the drugs were bound for to the port of Bremerhaven on Germany’s North Sea coast, officials said.