A pair of drug dealers were caught attempting to smuggle more than 420kg of heroin laced in pomegranate juice from Afghanistan.
Father and son Colin and Lee Bartlett were part of an organised crime group which set up a company with a fake director to import a huge shipment of the Class A drug worth £20,350,000.
The pair were watched along with 11 other workers unloading a container of 2.6 tonnes of juice spiked with heroin, which was concealed within the liquid in regular bottles.
Officers thwarted the shipment in Birmingham in May 2023.
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Colin, 54, was handed a 24-month prison sentence suspended for two years, while Lee, 30, was sentenced to 18 months in prison suspended for two months.
An appeal has now been launched to track down two other men, Shamut Khan, 56 and 23-year-old Matiullah Zamankhel.
Both are from Washwood Heath, a neighbourhood in Birmingham, and failed to comply with their bail conditions.
Derek Evans, a branch commander at the National Crime Agency, said: ‘These men were part of an organised crime group seeking to import huge quantities of heroin into the UK, potentially generating millions of pounds of criminal profit and endangering vulnerable people across the country.
‘Tackling class A drug trafficking is a priority for the NCA and we will continue to do all we can to stop those who try to import it.’
He added: ‘Khan and Zamankhel will know they are wanted by the NCA and should be absolutely certain that we won’t rest until we have tracked them down.
‘If members of the public do see Khan and Zamankhel, we ask them to contact us straight away.
‘We know these men come from a close-knit community and we would like to remind anyone helping them, or frustrating our attempts to locate him, that they could also find themselves being arrested.’
A total of £3bn of drug imports were seized at the UK border in the year up to March 2024.
The NCA reported that crime was being fuelled by record levels of opium and cocaine production in Afghanistan and Colombia.
Crime groups are also known to make use of corrupt officials at both ports and airports to bring in large quantities of illicit substances.
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