Three directors of a Vlissingen port bulk storage company went on trial in Breda on Thursday, accused of storing large quantities of cocaine smuggled in from South America.

The men were arrested in May following a lengthy investigation which partly relied on the information of an undercover police officer posing as a drug trafficker.

He paid €180,000 for a shipment of cocaine as part of the operation against Bulk Terminal Zeeland (BTZ)  which police had long suspected of helping to smuggle drugs into Zeeland. The drugs that were used in the sting came from a haul that was seized earlier.

The public prosecutor will have to prove that the sting operation, which involved 150 officials, cannot be qualified as entrapment, experts told RTL Nieuws.

Their lawyers “will say the initiative for the smuggling did not come from them but from the undercover officer. The public prosecutor will have to prove that is not the case,” undercover operations expert Sophie Naber said. However, a bit of “bait” to catch criminals is usually allowed by the court, she said.

The three men, aged 58, 56 and 43 and all from Zeeland, are also accused of falsifying documents and being members of a criminal organisation. All deny the allegations.

The episode has echoes of the IRT scandal in the 1990s, when a task force set up to tackle drug smuggling allowed thousands of kilos of cocaine to flow into the country so they could monitor the trade routes.

The team was heavily criticised by a parliamentary inquiry in 1994 for facilitating organised crime, acting without the knowledge of the justice ministry and allowing informants in drug gangs to act with virtual impunity.