That ship left the terminal on June 20 th around 4 p.m. The tracking shows that the two containers were handed to Cosco on June 14 th, 2018, were transported via a truck to a shipping terminal in Rotterdam, and on June 20 th were loaded onto a ship called the Cosco Spain. The numbers belonged to Cosco Shipping, the fourth largest shipping company in the world. We got two specific container numbers, which allow you to track their journey. What do we know about how those two cars made it to their first stop? In Germany, who is Mercedes selling these to and who is buying them? How did they get to North Korea? We contacted Mercedes and they gave us the standard, five bullet response. You were unable to determine who the purchaser from Daimler was of these two Mercedes-Maybach S 600’s, right? One of the questions we had for Daimler when investigating was, how many do you sell per year? They were not forthcoming. I do not think Mercedes is selling a lot of these. They are marketed to business leaders and world leaders. They are expensive for the average customer, starting at half a million dollars. The most important feature is that these are bulletproof cars. Get the Global Dispatches Podcast Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Play Music | Radio Public If you have 20 minutes and want to learn how North Korea evades sanctions, and what the international community can do to more robustly enforce those sanctions, have a listen. We discuss the step-by-step journey of these cars and in so doing, the story he tells reveals a weakness in international sanctions in general and on North Korea in particular. He is a visual investigations journalist with the New York Times video team, specializing in geospatial and open-source research. On the line with me to discuss his reporting is one of the journalists on the story, Christoph Koettl. And in so doing, they reveal how the North Korean regime is able to evade some sanctions. But using open source data and satellite imagery, the reporters and researchers were able to paint a pretty clear picture of how those cars ended up in NorthKorea. The route was a circuitous one, involving multiple shipping vessels docking in at least five countries over the course of several months.

Reporters from the New York Times teamed up with researchers at the non profit Center for Advanced Defense Studies to track two Mercedes Maybachs from their manufacture in Germany to the streets of Pyongyang. So how is it that Kim Jong Un has amassed fleet of high-end cars?Ī new report in the New York Times offers a glimpse into the complex ways that North Korea is able to evade international sanctions to import luxury cars - and perhaps also smuggle illicit goods and materiel into the country. This includes, since 2006, a ban on exporting of luxury goods to North Korea. North Korea is under the world’s most stringent set of international sanctions.

Cosco tracking container number