German customs officers confiscated seven times as much cocaine this year as in 2016, local public broadcaster ARD reported.
"For the German customs this year was extraordinary, in a negative sense — the amounts are exorbitantly high," a customs representative told the media source.
According to the latest data of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), almost seven tons of cocaine have been confiscated at German borders in 2017, primarily in major port cities like Hamburg and Bremerhaven.
The BKA argued that such a trend is common not only for Germany. According to its recent study, the amount of cocaine confiscated in various regions worldwide has doubled over the past five years.
German authorities are now expecting new seizures as part of a "flood of cocaine" originating from South America.
The BKA associates the rise in illegal drug trafficking with a significant expansion of the area of land that is used to grow the coca plant in Colombia. According to reports, illegal cocaine trade in Germany is organized by criminal gangs from Balkan countries and the Italian mafia.
The news about the extraordinary cocaine seizures came one week after Munich customs destroyed around 550 kilograms of marijuana, an amount that corresponds to around 3.8 million joints.
The marijuana was of such a good quality that it would have cost several million euros. The drugs were detected in Bavaria, south of Nuremberg, in December 2016, in a truck from Serbia.
