AMSTERDAM: A pilot is facing jail after being arrested on the toilet with his trousers down as he smuggled cocaine worth more than £2.4 million into the UK.
Dutch national John Buwalda, 49, was held by National Crime Agency officers in a Holiday Inn near Rochester Airport in Kent shortly after flying in from the Netherlands in a light aircraft.
Minutes earlier, his accomplice, Jan Polak, had been arrested outside the hotel carrying 48lb (22kg) of cocaine with a high purity level. NCA officer Jim McMorrow told the trial how he arrested Buwalda while he was sitting on the toilet.
He said that after Polak was detained, officers went to the hotel room he had been in and discovered Buwalda in the bathroom. He told the jury: “Mr Buwalda was sitting on the toilet. He had a white top on and his trousers were by his legs.
“I informed him we had arrested a man … and he had given us the room as the one he had been in.”I asked him what he was doing here and he said ‘I flew in from Hilversum today’. I informed him I was arresting him.”
The Old Bailey was told that the drugs, which were found to have an 80 per cent purity level, were worth £2,408,040 on the street.
