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18 months in jail for attempt to cross border

FSB border guards squad on alarm patrol along Russia's barbed-wire fence to Norway.

Climbing this barbed wire fence with Norway in the horizon is one of the most difficult ways to enter Schengen-Europe. For those who try, the penalty is a Russian Arctic prison cell.

Location

On July 7th, two Sudanese citizens were captured by armed FSB border guards after they climbed over the barbed wire fence Russia has set up along its 196 kilometer long border to Norway.

It is the press-service of FSB border guards in Murmansk region that reports about the arrest.

The court in Pechenga sentenced the two Sudanese citizens on November 13th to one and a half year in prison for the attempt to illegally cross the border to Norway.

Pechenga Regional Court house in Nikel.

The two men had traveled by train to Murmansk, from where they took a taxi to Nikel, Russia’s nearest town towards the border to Norway. From Nikel, the two walked into the taiga forest and found the border fence. 

The nearly three meter high barbed wire fence is equipped with a sophisticated alarm system triggered anytime someone touches the fence. 

Border guards can immediately see in which sector the alarm is triggered and send out a rapid reaction patrol with a sniffing bloodhound.

“Successful” illegal border crossings from Russia to Norway are highly infrequent. In the course of the last 12 years, only three persons have managed to climb the fence and enter Norway.

In 2005, two foreign citizens, a man from Central Asia entered Norway into the Jarfjord area while a citizen from North-Africa was found drowned on the Norwegian side of the Pasvik river, believed to have tried to swim over the river constituting the southern part of the Russian-Norwegian border.

In August 2012, a man from Africa managed to swim over the river and applied for asylum in Norway.

Last year, FSB border guards started to build a second fence, making it a double barbed wire fence for some kilometers of the border.