County lines drug cartels spread north of the Border

‘A wider cycle of crime’

DRUG gangs from England are expanding their crime networks throughout Scotland at an alarming speed, a senior police officer has warned.

Powerful cartels operating in cities south of the Border have taken a grip in areas including Aberdeenshire, the Lothians, Ayrshire and the Borders.

The trend, known as ‘county lines’ dealing, involves gangs selling drugs outside their own cities to limit their chance of getting caught.

The gangs are known to use boys and girls as young as nine to carry backpacks full of drugs to deal in other towns and villages.

Scottish police are working with officers from England in a bid to tackle the problem.

Detective Chief Inspector Garry Mitchell, Scotland’s lead officer on the county lines initiative, estimates that about three quarters of drugs dealing in Scotland is co-ordinated by crime lords in Merseyside.

He said: ‘It affects a range of areas. What they’re looking for is a market opportunity to exploit a rural community.

‘We are working very closely with Merseyside Police to try to target some of that criminal activity.’

Police Scotland is working in collaboration with Merseyside officers and England’s North West Regional Organised Crime Unit – a group set up to tackle serious and organised crime that crosses regional borders in the north-west of England.

Cartels from London, the Midlands, Merseyside and Greater Manchester are known to use vulnerable youngsters as drug mules, recruiting them to distribute heroin, crack cocaine and cannabis.

The drug mules use trains and taxis to reach rural areas and can typically earn up to £3,000 a day supplying cocaine and heroin.

The youngsters are also lured to join the gangs with incentives such as branded clothing and mobile phones.

Children as young as nine are said to have been trafficked from as far afield as Birmingham to Scotland to work in the trade.

The cartels have targeted north-east Scotland – but police intelligence shows they have also infiltrated other communities.

Gang members also establish their distribution networks by recruiting locals.

They exploit local addicts by taking control of their homes and using them as ‘trap houses’.

From these bases they can sell and make drugs in a practice known as ‘cuckooing’.

Ross Thomson, Conservative MP for Aberdeen South, said crime gangs from Wolverhampton have infiltrated the community, coercing young people into selling drugs. He said: ‘This type of drug dealing and exploitation is having a devastating impact in Aberdeen.

‘I have heard from community workers that young kids are wooed over by these guys.

‘They offer them a bit of protection, get them hooked in with drugs. Before they know it, they’re sucked into a wider cycle of knife crime and gang activity.’

This month, a UK clampdown on county lines operations led to 200 arrests.

Nearly 60 vulnerable people were helped, including several children.

The operation involved the seizure of weapons including hunting knives, a gun and ammunition, an axe, a meat cleaver and a samurai sword.

More than 4,000 people have been arrested in the past two years as police battle the drugs gangs, while a £3.6million county lines co-ordination centre was opened by the National Crime Agency last month.

One Birmingham drug dealer was jailed earlier this month for running a racket involving children.

Zakaria Mohammed, 21, trafficked his vulnerable victims more than 100 miles from their homes and used them as ‘expendable workhorses’ to work for him in squalid drug dens.

Police said the children were found in a ‘filthy’ one-bedroom flat with two Class A drug users, surrounded by used syringes.

Detectives had launched an investigation when two missing 15-year-old boys from Birmingham were found living in desperate conditions at a flat in Lincoln.

Three other boys were then found in another freezing flat.

Mohammed was jailed for 14 years after admitting four counts of possessing drugs with intent to supply and five counts of human trafficking relating to three children.

West Midlands Police said it was the first time a force had secured a child trafficking conviction in a county lines investigation using the Modern Slavery Act.