A group of men have been found guilty of smuggling £4.3m worth of cannabis from Africa to the UK hidden in sacks of gari powder.
A container load of the flour arrived at Tilbury Docks in Essex from Ghana on 19 December 2019 before police intercepted it and replaced the drugs with dummy packages before letting a lorry collect it.
Daniel Yeboah, 54, Kristoffen Baidoo, 48, Kwaku Bonsu, 52, all from London, and Edward Adjei, 48, from Basildon in Essex, were convicted after a three-week trial at Southwark Crown Court.
Baidoo did not appear at the trail but was found guilty in his absence, and all four men are due to be sentenced on 18 October.
Following leads gathered by the NCA and the Ghanaian Narcotics Control Commission, officers held the container at Tilbury and found 2,335 packages of herbal cannabis hidden inside white hessian sacks of the gari powder.
The drugs were seized and replaced with dummy packages.
The NCA said a lorry was then allowed to deliver the container to an industrial yard in north London on 13 January 2020.
Yeboah signed the delivery note using a fake signature and a worker at the yard removed the container seal with an angle grinder.
NCA officers said they saw Bonsu circling round the industrial yard in his car before taking photographs of the container using his mobile phone, and Adjei was spotted dropping Baidoo off at the yard.
After realising the drugs had gone missing, a NCA spokesperson said “they all then fled the site in different cars, abandoning the load shortly after the container was opened”.
‘A little dodgy’
Officers found a 10-tonne hydraulic press, often used for compressing drugs, at Baidoo’s address and seized a number of devices from the men, including mobile phones and dashcams from their vehicles.
Footage downloaded from the dashcam in Adjei’s Toyota picked up his phone calls to Baidoo and Yeboah shortly after the container arrived at the yard.
During a call with Yeboah, he said, “my brother, be a little watchful. It is all a little dodgy”.
The NCA said Yeboah was also picked up on later calls telling Adjei “I don’t think the food [drugs] is in it” and “there was gari inside, they have removed most of the gari. The people are thieves”.
NCA senior investigating officer Saju Sasikumar said: “Putting these harmful criminal groups before the courts and dismantling their illegal operations is a key part of the NCA’s mission to protect the public from serious and organised crime.”
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