Bungling drug smugglers who lost at least half their £70 million cocaine shipment off the side of a yacht in the English Channel have been jailed.
Stephen Lloyd-Jones, 56, was the captain of a boat he had bought for £100,000 and kitted out with state-of-the-art equipment in order to ship drugs into the UK under the cover of darkness.
Lloyd-Jones, a former long-distance lorry driver, plotted with Kursat Kizilkaya, 33, and Tiamo Zanaj, 33, to collect bags of cocaine from a cargo ship in the English Channel, and bring the drugs ashore in Eastbourne.
They were captured by police as they landed at Sovereign Harbour in the East Sussex seaside town and had 350kg of cocaine – worth £35 million – on board the yacht.
But the Crown Prosecution Service said at least half of the cocaine shipment had been lost overboard in rough seas in the Channel, when the boat was damaged, a specially-fitted winch to get the drugs onboard had malfunctioned, and Lloyd-Jones had suffered “serious injuries to his fingers”.
At Kingston crown court on Wednesday, Lloyd-Jones, who lives in Folkestone in Kent, was jailed for 24 years over the plot, while Zanaj, of Ilford, northeast London,was sentenced to 22 years behind bars. Kizilkaya, from Falmouth, Cornwall, is due to be sentenced later this month.
“Lloyd-Jones, a self-confessed master mariner, spun a web of lies whilst sourcing the equipment needed to smuggle such a large quantity of drugs, telling people that he was using the boat for commercial diving, or needed equipment for family members that were crab fisherman”, said Paul Goddard, of the Crown Prosecution Service.
“None of this was true at all – he and Zanaj knew exactly what they were doing and had an agreed mission to smuggle a vast amount of cocaine into the UK, which if successful, would have been worth tens of millions of pounds.”
The court heard Lloyd-Jones bought the small yacht, named the Well Plumbed, for £100,000 and fitted it with the winch, floatation devices, radar equipment, navigation devices, on-board Wi-Fi, a satellite telephone and spare fuel tanks.
He had instructions for communicating with the cargo ship using coded signals from a laser pen, and they received the drugs in a rendezvous off the coast of Guernsey.
Cocaine had been wrapped in 1kg blocks, to be placed in waterproof holdalls inside giant white sacks which would be towed behind Lloyd-Jones’ boat.
“Despite evidence of the significant preparations made to facilitate this operation, only a fraction of the expected quantity actually made it to shore having lost at least half of the load in rough seas during the night between 17 and 18 February 2023”, said the CPS.
“The difficult weather conditions caused damage to the boat and issues with the winch, as well as injuries to the crew, with Lloyd-Jones suffering seriousinjuries to his fingers.”
The three men were arrested at Sovereign Harbour, and they were subsequently charged with a drugs smuggling conspiracy.
The CPS said Lloyd-Jones and Zanaj claimed to have been involved in the plot “under duress”, but all three men were found guilty after a trial.
