Two guilty of smuggling £512m of cocaine in UK’S biggest haul
● Three tonnes of drugs found hidden in tug in Europe’s largest seaborne seizure
Two Turkish men have been found guilty of smuggling more than three tonnes of cocaine after the biggest seizure of the drug in the UK. Mumin Sahin and Emin Ozmen were found guilty at the High Court in Glasgow of the £512 million smuggling operation.
Co-accused Kayacan Dalgakiran, Mustafa Guven, Umit Colakel and Ibrahim Dag were found not proven by majority verdict.
The drugs were found inside the ship MV Hamal when it was 100 miles off the coast of Aberdeen in April last year.
The modified hold – storing the biggest cocaine haul found at sea in Europe – was described as one of the most sophisticated ever seen by drug enforcement officers.
The Tanzanian-registered tugboat, sailing from Istanbul, Turkey, Tenerife and then to the North Sea, was intercepted by the Royal Navy warship HMS Somerset and Border Force officials.
Skipper Sahin, 47, and Ozmen, 51, were found guilty of being knowingly concerned with the carrying and concealing of cocaine on the ship and of being concerned in the supplying of cocaine. Lord Kinclaven deferred sentence on the pair until next month.
The Border Force and the National Crime Agency (NCA) sprang into action following a tip-off from French custom officials. The Hamal had turned off its Automated Identification System, so it could not be tracked and had to be spotted by “eyes in the sky” scouring the Atlantic and North Sea. Unarmed officers boarded and took it to Aberdeen.
A welded plate was found inside protecting a dry void within a ballast tank. Due to the tight space, it took officials two hours to cut through the steel with a household drill, where they found the cocaine.
Border Force director Murdo Macmillan said: “This was very sophisticated.”
In total, 128 bales of cocaine weighing 3.2 tonnes was found in the hatch, with a street value of £512m. John Mcgowan, of NCA Border Policing Command in Scotland, said:“the concealment was sufficiently secure if that vessel faced a random customs stop the chances of those drugs being found were next to nil.”
An NCA officer told the trial how he and his colleagues formed a human chain to unload the bales of cocaine, which took two days.
In an unusual move – and amid tight security – the drugs were brought to court for the jury to see.