TO the villagers who saw it silently slip past in the late half-light along an estuary off the coast of Papua New Guinea, it was so unusual and out of context to them they did not have the words to describe it.

They could only recount it was like a “large blue dolphin” except on its back there were men who crawled about, their tanned skin and actions making them look like giant mud crabs as they sought a specific place to berth along the myriad of tributaries that flow through PNG’s Western Province.

“Yes, from their descriptions we know they were submarines,” Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary Chief of Operations deputy commissioner Jim Andrews said nonchalantly of the first of many sightings.

Narco traffickers from Colombia have long used such submersible and semi-submersible craft with 6500 litre fuel tanks and bow compartments able to carry eight tonnes of cocaine per vessel, making trips to Mexico and the United States highly profitable.

MORE: Aussie cops set to fight crime on PNG streets

But since 2006 there has been growing reports of these type of foreign craft in the Western Province off the coast of Daru and in the Gulf Province notably along the Purari River that flows almost 500km from the south central Highlands to the sea, collecting high-grade marijuana in exchange for delivery of military weapons and explosives.

The appearance of the craft highlights what Deputy Commissioner Andrews sees as just another example of a growing problem in weapons and drugs being traded in PNG by foreign nationals including Australians making the short hop across the Torres Strait.

The implications for Australia’s border security — where at its closest point PNG shores are just 4km from Australian island territory and 150km from Australia mainland — are huge with such significant movements of drugs and guns now and the heavily-armed lawlessness of PNG, prompting Canberra to take notice and move quickly to better assist.

After years of discussion and debate the Australian Federal Police appear poised to move back to the PNG to help local forces fight escalating armed violence and provide technology and vital intel to crack down on transnational crime. There were almost 170 AFP officers in PNG in 2005 when they were abruptly forced to leave under a constitutional challenge that stripped armed officers’ authority to operate there and be granted immunity from prosecution. Instead a small non-operational unarmed contingent has been kept on to advise and assist. Those numbers have been boosted to more than 75 personnel in recent weeks in the lead up to Port Moresby’s hosting of APEC this November but the move is on now by the PNG Parliament to grant them powers to stay on in an operational capacity.

For Mr Andrews such a move could not come soon enough with his country already awash with domestic crime not only attracting transnational crime from Australia and Indonesia but now as far away as Europe exacerbating the domestic violent crime scene the level of which is disproportionate for a country not at war.

“From where the submarine men came from we don’t know but they were white men, tall with tattoos everywhere all over their arms and the villagers called them ‘mud crabs’ because that’s what they looked like,” he said.

“We think maybe they could be from Italy and were Mafia, the description is from those drug dealing groups, Mafia coming from that way because money is so good. It’s a real challenge to tackle this situation. Daru tributaries and waterways and all these swamps everywhere and the thick jungles all the way to border post of Vanimo, it is a challenging area.

“They are Australian criminals coming in too and third country nationals coming in …. Not just submarines but in those isolated areas we also have airstrips that are unmanned by government so they use small aeroplanes to land and do their illegal business. Also logging vessels that are coming in they are bringing in all the rubbish as well, drugs and guns and pornographic material.”

PNG law enforcement is at a crossroads and despite best intentions is being overwhelmed by the criminals armed with better weapons, better technology and better intelligence to flourish their criminal enterprises. Explosives were also being trafficked although were largely for use in fishing.

According to PNG police, more common than subs is the land shipment of AK47 weapons from Indonesia, low-grade M16s from the Philippines and small arms and calibre weapons delivered by small boats from mainland Australia, all trading weapons for cash or “Niugini Gold”, a potent red-stemmed cannabis plant. According to police, an automatic weapon now sells on the black market for 50,000 kina (A$20,000) such is the unwavering demand particularly by tribes in the Southern Highlands. There is also evidence of Australian criminal entities importing precursor chemicals including P2P (phenyl 2 propanone) from the Daru region of PNG for the manufacture of methamphetamine ‘ice’ in Australia.

There has long been rumours and reports of weapons and drugs trading via small boats between PNG and Australia — aided by a network of small islands and reefs that at low tide particularly make for easy passage from the northern tip of Queensland to PNG’s coastline — but Police Minister Jelta Wong said it was all sadly too real.

“Yes that is true, the reports that have come to us that is why I spoke to the Australian Federal Police Commissioner (Andrew Colvin) and we are putting a plan together,” he said yesterday.

“We’ve got the boats we are thinking of bringing up, ex NSW Police boats and put them in that area there (Torres Strait) so we can target these sort of people. There’s no point having the big boats because by the time they gear up and are ready to go those guys would have left already in their little speed boats. So we need fast small boats where our people can manoeuvre around the reefs and island up around there in north of Australia.”

Mr Wong said a big problem was the making of weapons at technical schools or any tool shop with a lathe piecing together scrap metal for tribal wars but now the market has opened up for heavy calibre weapons. Weapons amnesties net the homemade stock but not the high-grade weaponry known to have entered the country mainly from Indonesia both legally and illegally.

“We were not strong enough on the border where guns were coming in from Indonesia, factory made weapons were being brought in through the mountains and onto the islands to be used for tribal warfare,” he said.

“We are talking about AK-47s, much more advanced than the police force, we have the Sig rifles and the M16s and all that but when we have to go up against these AK-47s with people standing there in the mountains, you wonder how they get these things … in PNG illegal weapons now outweigh in quantity so much more than the licensed ones.”

One of dangers of the smuggling of Nuigini Gold, known in the Gulf Province as kuku dipi or ‘evil smoke’, is the potential transfer of disease with spit often used to wet the leaf for compact packaging; tuberculosis (TB) is prevalent in many parts of PNG.

Despite recent professional rivalries and physical disputes, the RPNGC and PNG Defence Forces are looking to conduct more joint operations at the insistence of the PNG Parliament to not only protect the economy but also world leaders including US President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull expected to attend APEC.

RPNGC’s paramilitary Special Services Division (SSD) Chief Superintendent Jim Namora said firearms in PNG was as much a cultural status symbol as it was used for protection and that meant seizing them difficult even with his AFP-trained and equally armed 20 paramilitary squads. There is also a new emerging threat from those protecting criminal enterprises.

“Unfortunately it is the reality now that the bad guys have much more firepower superiority than our guys,” he said. “But it’s not only the bad guy some of those bad guys are ex-military and ex-police and that places us in a more dangerous position when you have a trained guy shooting at you. So we have incidents where we have found the guy shooting at us had military training or he was once a soldier or a police officer. In that type of situation it is rather difficult … they are hired because of skill they have police or military training and know how to handle a gun … I would not say mercenaries but these guys bordering mercenaries and shooting back at police is now becoming frequent. Australia and New Zealand police though are helping us, we can fight these criminal people.”