The ‘cocaine collectors’ retrieving smuggled drugs in Rotterdam

On a flickering CCTV screen, a dozen shadowy figures run with military precision in a line towards a shipping container in the port of Rotterdam.

Its freight of tropical fruit from Colombia may already have been unloaded, but this metal box – 12m long and identical to so many thousands of others here – still has cargo on board. Eighty kg of cocaine are hidden inside the refrigeration unit – drugs with a local street value of around 4m euro (£3.4m).

The collectors’ job is to get the drugs out of the container and away from the docks, from where they will be transported to Amsterdam, Berlin and London.

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