Horrified mum finds crystal meth in cereal Br eaking Br eakfast
A MAN was arrested and shipping containers searched for drugs after a young mother found a package of crystal meth inside a box of cereal she bought for her children, writes Jon Austin.
Met Police officers arrested the 50-year-old man at an address in Dagenham, east London, at 7am on Friday.
At the same time, a number of shipping containers were searched at locations across the area.
In scenes that could have come from the drama Breaking Bad, where a drug lord works out of a fast food restaurant, the investigation was launched after the mum found the drugs in a clear plastic bag inside a packet of the Nestlé cereal Golden Morn, which is imported from Africa.
It is suspected the class A drug was being imported inside the cereal.
A source said: “A woman in her 20s, who lives locally and has two primary school-aged children, bought a couple of packets of Golden Morn, which I believe is popular in African countries such as Nigeria and has to be imported to the UK.
“The packets were bought from a local mini-market.
“She opened one and found a clear plastic bag containing a white rocky substance, believed to be crystal meth,” the source said.
“She was horrified and reported it to the police as soon as she found it. Nobody ate or touched any of the drugs.”
Police spent weeks investigating the source of the drugs, before the raids on Friday, when officers used angle grinders to break into a number of shipping containers, and X-ray machinery was used to scan packages of food found inside.
A Met Police spokesman said:
“The arrest was the result of an investigation that was launched in July after a member of the public found a quantity of class A drugs concealed in a packet of cereal.
“Fortunately, they didn’t ingest anything in the packet and suffered no ill-effects.the cereal had been purchased during a routine shop at an independent supermarket in Dagenham on June 30.
“Officers from the East Area Gangs Unit carried out extensive inquiries to establish how the drugs came to be inside the cereal packet, culminating in the operations on Friday.”
The man arrested has been bailed until next month.