Priti’s praise for officers on dawn raid

PRITI Patel yesterday joined police officers on a dawn raid as they arrested a 24-year-old man on suspicion of supplying drugs and firearms.

After gaining access to the man’s encrypted phone, the National Crime Agency kept tabs on him for four weeks before moving in to arrest him in London’s Soho district yesterday.

Police were set to raid an address in Lewisham, southeast London, early yesterday morning before intelligence suggested the suspect may have moved addresses the previous night.

Having identified four potential flats in a quiet Soho side street, officers drew the suspect outside before arresting him.

The man, thought to be from Albania or Kosovo, is also suspected of conspiracy to murder and kidnap. Miss Patel was flanked by police as she watched him being held against a wall and searched.

The Home Secretary praised the ‘phenomenal’ operation that resulted in hundreds of arrests across the country.

She said: ‘This is incredible for policing because it’s involved, as you’ve seen, one police force in the Metropolitan Police, and then the National Crime Agency that have been leading all sorts of operation work on this – this is extraordinary work.

‘We’ve seen policing become integrated in a way in which we’re able to take hardened criminals off the streets of our country.’ She added: ‘Something like £50million has been taken off the streets in terms of illicit finance but you’ll hear much more about the quantity of drugs taken off the streets, the level and number of firearms and the number of criminal gangs that have been broken up.

‘This has been an incredible operation and the type of operation that has used police forces across the country based on intelligence and some proper hard criminals have been taken off the streets of our country.’

Miss Patel said: ‘We live in a society, even with Covid taking place, where we still see the most sophisticated crimes and criminals still facilitating their activity, participating in crime and disorder – it’s unacceptable. We still see that lives are being devastated – young lives, in particular – through criminality, through drugs, firearms and other type of dreadful things we must stop.’

NCA director of investigations Nikki Holland said yesterday’s raids were just the start of a lengthy operation and represented the beginning of the end for criminals whose activities were previously untraceable.

She said: ‘We’ve got a lot of activity to come, so if you’re a criminal with an encrypted device, be ready because we’re coming for you.’