COURIER CAUGHT WITH £100K OF CLUB DRUG IN BACK SEAT

Driver has now been jailed for 18 months after officers caught him with 11kg of the former ‘legal high’

BZP courier Casim Mahmood has been jailed

A£100,000 stash of outlawed club drug BZP was found after police searched a driver in Longsight.

Around 11kg of the drug – which was sold as a ‘legal high’ until it was banned in 2009 – was found on the back seat of Casim Mahmood’s Volkswagen Golf.

The drug is so rarely seized that police believed it was a class A substance, until tests confirmed thecrystals were class C benzylpiperazine which had been cut with caffeine.

Casim Mahmood, 21, who was acting as courier for the drug, has now been jailed for 18 months.

Dillon Dignum, a teenager who was with Mahmood at the time, was given 100 hours unpaid work, an employment, education and training order, and a specified activity requirement in the same Manchester Crown Court hearing.

The pair’s sentencing heard in the moments before police searched the vehicle, Dignum, then just 17, had met up with Mahmood to pay him money he owed him for cannabis. While at Mahmood’s flat, he was asked to carry the bag containing the BZP to his car.

Shortly afterwards officers spotted the vehicle, smelt cannabis, carried out a search and found the stimulant. Analysis of phones owned by Mahmood revealed both were involved in the cannabis trade. However, when it came to the BZP, Dignum was merely ‘in the wrong place at the wrong time’.

Mahmood, of Hexham Road, Gorton, and Dignum, now 18, of Stedman Close, Beswick, both admitted possessing class C drugs with intent to supply in relation to the BZP, and being concerned in the supply of cannabis.