Helsinki District Court has convicted four men of aggravated drug offences and sentenced them to prison terms ranging from seven and a half to 10 years. The decisions, handed down on Thursday, stem from last December’s record cocaine seizure in Espoo, just west of Helsinki.
The masked men attacked a property owned by the Algol corporation in broad daylight on 15 December last year.
Hidden in a container in the warehouse, police found 176.1 kilos of cocaine, apparently the largest haul ever found in Finland. They estimate that it had a street value of over 25 million euros. The packets of cocaine were concealed inside sacks of steel grit.
The perpetrators fled when police arrived but after a manhunt some of them were detained that evening at Helsinki’s Olympic Terminal. They were trying to leave the country by ship in two cars.
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Police wrapped up the preliminary investigation in August with international cooperation through the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI). The trial began at Helsinki District Court on 2 September.
Four of the convicts are Danes while one is Swedish. One of the Danes also holds Somali citizenship. They range in age from 20 to 33. The prosecutor had sought 13-year prison terms for all four.
Two men were also convicted of making unlawful threats and one of assault. The court handed the longest sentence to the man it determined had been the ringleader of the operation.
Charges of attempted robbery were dropped, as the court ruled that the cocaine was not the property of the company to whose property it had been brought inside a legal freight delivery.
Police determined that the container arrived in Finland by sea, having been shipped from Brazil via Rotterdam in the Netherlands. They say the cocaine was not at least entirely intended for the Finnish market, but was to have been taken elsewhere.
