Yahoo Finance Pair jailed over £32m of cocaine smuggled inside yam shipment
Two smugglers who tried to bring £32 million worth of cocaine into the UK disguised as root vegetables have been jailed for a total of 36 years.
Juan David Perea Lopez, 26, even posed as an aide to a Saudi Arabian Sheikh to lease a large industrial unit to store the drugs haul.
Lopez and Bashar Fares Al-Safee, 31, arranged the importation of 400kg of the class A drug – which was concealed in the shipment of yams from Costa Rica in 2016.
Al-Safee, of north Kensington, west London, was sentenced to 21 years and Lopez, of New Cross, south London, received 15 years at Southwark Crown Court on Friday.
The pair were convicted of conspiracy to import and conspiracy to supply following a seven-week trial.
The container arrived from Costa Rica to the London Gateway Port in Essex in June 2016, and was due to be delivered to an industrial estate in north-west London, it added.
A number of boxes had false bottoms stuffed with compressed blocks of cocaine powder, which had a purity of 61 to 68 per cent after being cut with deworming agent Levamisole.
A National Crime Agency investigation found “Lopez had leased the £17,000 per-quarter industrial unit by pretending to work as an assistant to a Saudi Arabian Sheikh who needed the space to store high value cars”.
In a statement, investigators added: “Al-Safee had also hijacked the identity of a real fruit import business and set up false e-mail addresses and a virtual office in an attempt to appear legitimate.
“NCA investigators were able to link Al-Safee to pre-paid ‘burner’ phones at the specific times they were used to arrange the importation, and also obtained expert voice analysis to show that Al-Safee had arranged payment for the shipment with currency brokers – despite him using a false name.
“The company that sent the consignment was investigated by Costa Rican authorities. This resulted in the arrest of one of the directors and the seizure of a tonne of cocaine following the search of a fruit packing plant.”
Jacque Beer, regional head of investigations at the NCA, said: “This seizure and the investigation that followed has kept a huge quantity of cocaine off UK streets, and brought traffickers to account in the UK and Central America.
“Lopez and Al-Safee sought to profit from a trade that fuels violence and exploitation throughout the UK and all along the international supply chain.”
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