Three drug traffickers were today jailed for a total of 14 years after police discovered a £632,000 haul of cannabis smuggled in animal feed while carrying out a search for missing children.
Officers were looking for youngsters from a residential school when they came across 164 kilos of the drug in vans and a portable cabin at Plains, near Airdrie, in North Lanarkshire, which had been transported in consignments of horse fodder from Spain.
Gary Campbell, 37, Kieran Sinclair, 26, and Stephen Jones, 55, earlier admitted being concerned in the supply of the Class B drugs at Arbuckle Road, in Plains, between October 19 and 22 in 2019.
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A judge told Campbell at the High Court in Edinburgh that he was satisfied that he had played a role that was central to the commercial importation of the drugs.
Lord Young said that it was clear that Campbell was involved in ordering and arranging payment for the delivery of the animal feed in which the cannabis was hidden.
The judge said that he agreed with the author of a background report prepared on Campbell that he sought to minimise to some extent his involvement in the operation.
Lord Young said: "I acknowledge that you are assessed as a low risk of reoffending."
He told Campbell, of Langloan Street, Coatbridge, that he would have faced a six year jail term but for his guilty plea. He was sentenced to five years and five months imprisonment.
Sinclair, of Wallace Way, Lanark, was jailed for three years and nine months after the judge said he was satisfied that he had played a role in unpacking, storing and transporting the drugs.
Jones, of White Street, Partick, Glasgow, played a similar role and he was jailed for four years and 10 months. He has previous convictions for drug dealing.
The court heard that police were looking for children from a residential school when they stopped Sinclair and Jones in Plains. The pair ran off and officers checked a van and suspected it contained cannabis.
They found a further van and a portable cabin. More than 70 kilos of cannabis were recovered from the vehicles and 18 sacks of animal feed were found in the cabin containing 90 kilos of the drug.
Prosecutor Liam Ewing KC said it was found that a delivery had been made from a company in Malaga, in Spain.
The advocate depute said: "Subsequent enquiries revealed that the deliveries of hay from Spain had been ordered on behalf of a company in which Campbell was a director. Payment had been made from his bank account to cover the cost of delivery."
Defence solicitor advocate Rhonda Anderson, for Campbell, said he had been directed to carry out the transaction by others.
She said: "He felt a degree of pressure to become involved. He deeply regrets having done so. This is a man who had no previous association whatsoever with drugs or involvement with drugs."
Geoff Forbes, counsel for Jones, said the former mechanic was "totally unaware" of the scale of the drugs operation. He said he was "a man with a van" who acted as a gopher and was not a "controlling mind" in the cannabis enterprise.
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