A Castle Rock man is in a Canadian jail facing dozens of gun-smuggling charges after customs agents at a border crossing with Montana found a cache of assault weapons and ammunition stashed in his trailer on Aug. 1.
Bjorn Patrik Sjostrom, 43, is accused of trying to smuggle in three fully automatic assault rifles, seven semiautomatic handguns and one semiautomatic shotgun, Canadian media reported.
“These aren’t hunting rifles,” Royal Canadian Mounted Police Inspector Joe McGeough told the Lethbridge Herald, the newspaper in the town where Sjostrom is being held. “This kind of ammo is very hard to get in Canada. It’s very expensive, and it’s worth a lot on the street.”
Mounties are working with U.S. law enforcement to investigate where Sjostrom obtained the weapons and ammunition and what he intended to do with them.
Anyone with information can call toll-free, 888-502-9060.
Sjostrom faces four customs violations and 45 criminal charges.
“His story of his reason in coming to Canada was incongruent, and the officers then did a check of his vehicle,” Gary Selk, chief of operations for the Canada Border Services Agency in southern Alberta, told the Calgary Herald.
Media reported that Sjostrom is Canadian-born and was carrying a Canadian passport, but was a resident of Colorado. Records show he has lived in Castle Rock in the 1100 block of North Burlington Drive since 2007 and lived in a Greenwood Village apartment two years before that.
No one answered the phone at his Castle Rock home.
His court record in Colorado includes eight traffic offenses in Doug las, Jefferson and Arapahoe counties since 2006, and he has a September court date in Douglas County in a civil case filed last month by a debt-collection company.
Joey Bunch: 303-954-1174 or jbunch@denverpost.com
