BRUSSELS: A drug runner who used a specially adapted Porsche to smuggle drugs worth millions of pounds into the UK has been jailed for eight years.
64 year-old Johan De Craemer, from Bruges in Belgium was stopped by Border Force officers at Dover as he arrived on a ferry from Calais on the 20th January 2014. He claimed to be visiting the UK for a business trip.
During an inspection of the Porsche Cayenne he was travelling in they discovered plates concealing specially constructed compartments underneath the vehicle.
Inside were 58 packages containing 52 kilos of cocaine and three kilos of heroin. The haul had a likely potential street value of more than £11 million pounds.
NCA investigators pieced together De Craemer’s movements and found that he made five other trips to the UK with the same vehicle.
On his previous visit, less than two weeks before, he drove the vehicle to a hotel in the Docklands area of London, where CCTV footage showed it was driven away by another man, only to be returned to the hotel several hours later.
De Craemer was charged with four counts of importing class A drugs, and on 25 July he was found guilty on all charges by a jury at Canterbury Crown Court. On 20 January he was sentenced to serve eight years.
