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Crabs on fire

More than 800 confiscated King crabs’ carcasses were burnt near the border town Nikel by border guards.

Location

King crab poaching is a widespread phenomenon on the coast of the Kola Peninsula. The King crabs were originally taken from the Pacific in the 60ties and put out near Murmansk in the Barents Sea.  

According to one of the border guard officers, the story began from the anonymous phone call to a driver of minivan in Murmansk. A stranger suggested to the driver that he could come and pick up some cargo somewhere in the Pechenga district and transport it to Murmansk for money compensation. Pechanga located close to the Norwegian border.

The driver from agreed. After loading the cargo containing the King Crab he started to drive back to Murmansk. But he was soon stopped by border guards at a road checkpoint. The Border guards revealed that the cargo was crab meat with no correspondent documents on it. In suspicion, that the crabs were taken illegally, the cargo was arrested. Further investigation confirmed this assumption.

The further destiny of the illegal crab cargo was sad: crab carcasses were counted and weighted in the border guards’ headquarter in Nikel. Afterwards they were transported outside the town, unloaded into one heap and burnt.