How murder set off probe that trapped 700 dealers

WHEN twins Steve and Eddie Stannard struck a deal to let a teenage drug dealer from London take over their Norwich flat to sell drugs, they thought he would be a free source of heroin.

Just five days later, Steve, a 37-yearold addict, was stabbed to death by their house guest Hassiem Baqir, 19, who also turned the machete-style blade on his victim’s border collie.

Then, with what a judge later described as ‘callous indifference’, Baqir went to the cinema for the afternoon.

The shocking murder, in November 2016, left a bloody trail that would lead detectives to a London drugs gang and kickstart a mammoth operation.

Norfolk Police launched Operation Gravity to tackle the new phenomenon of ‘county lines’ drug gangs, eventually trapping more than 700 drug dealers across the county.

The practice of taking over the home of a vulnerable person by drug dealers is known as ‘cuckooing’, after the bird which takes over the nests of others.

Eddie Stannard later gave evidence at Baqir’s trial to say he was not happy about their flat being invaded by the teenager, who was being paid £100 a day to be a runner for a London gang. But he said: ‘It ain’t easy to say no.’ Now 39, he was jailed for three years last week for dealing heroin in the latest prosecution sparked by his brother’s death.

Official statistics show that offences involving violence against the person in the region rose 117 per cent from 8,294 in 2013 to 18,002 in 2017.

The number of robberies in Norfolk – many drug related – rose by 140 per cent in the same period. In some instances, addicts were being stabbed over drugs debts as little as £10.

Assistant Chief Constable Paul Sanford said: ‘We were seeing a level of violence that was out of place in Norfolk, a level of violence we hadn’t seen before. It was at that point that we thought we really needed to act.’

Undercover officers infiltrated drug networks providing crucial intelligence which led to arrests of suspects from towns and cities across the country including London, Bristol, Portsmouth and Teesside.

Following the success of Operation Gravity, the force mounted a second investigation codenamed Granary, in which a remarkably courageous undercover officer known as Tommo spent six months systematically infiltrating local drug networks – resulting in 72 prosecutions so far.

Mr Sanford said: ‘ Such has been the level of arrests that we are now hearing on the grapevine that offenders are talking about our operation by name and starting to identify Norfolk as a difficult place to operate and that’s why we have been doing what we have been doing.’

‘That’s far from saying the problem has gone away. It’s a wicked problem which will keep coming back and we have really had to work hard to reduce the scale of the threat. Through 714 arrests and the huge level of resources and time we’ve put into it, we have reduced the number of county lines and I genuinely think that our work has reduced levels of serious violence in the county.’

Norwich has one of the highest rates of deaths from illegal drugs in the country. The only towns nationwide with a higher rate are Swansea, Port Talbot and Hartlepool. Mr Sanford said: ‘The next stage of our work will be looking about how we can prevent young people getting involved in the first place.

‘We are now commencing some work with our local children’s department to look at how we can put in place some preventative work, so as soon as we identify a 12-year-old or a child who is on the fringes of this criminality we can divert them into something better.

‘That’s got to be our ambition. Last year we funded assemblies in every high school for Year 8 children advising them of the risks and threat associated with county lines.’

Mr Sanford said protecting the children involved was a priority. ‘We had one case where an individual of 12 years of age was arrested,’ he added.

‘The important thing to say is that children of that age in the majority of cases, they themselves have been exploited and just because that child is arrested does not mean that there is a criminal justice process that follows. Indeed sometimes that arrest is the safest way to get that child out of the problems they are in and we will then be more concerned about safeguarding them.’

Chris Youell, a senior prosecutor with CPS East of England who has dealt with many Operation Granary and Gravity cases, has likened the battle against county lines to ‘ cutting the head off a hydra’. When a 17-year-old was caught acting as a ‘phone holder’ for a county line in Norfolk, Mr Youell argued against giving him bail, telling a judge: ‘To say the chain has been broken would be a little optimistic. When the foot soldiers are arrested these groups get a new phone number and start again.’

‘A level of violence we hadn’t seen’