KINGSTON: Police are hunting a cocaine smuggler from Brentford who was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment in his absence after going on the run.
Solomon Cobourne, of Ealing Road, Brentford, was sentenced for helping import cocaine worth an estimated £28.5 million from Los Angeles to the streets of East Sussex and London.
The 35-year old, who was convicted on November 24 of conspiracy to import cocaine, fled following his arrest last August and is now wanted by police in the UK and his native Jamaica.
Rorey Rose, of Harlesden High Street, was also sentenced at Brighton Crown Court yesterday (Wednesday, January 28) after admitting the same offence. The 34-year-old was jailed for 14 years and will be deported to his native Jamaica on his release from prison.
The court heard how Sussex Police had intercepted a FedEx package being delivered to Bexhill in 2011 and found it contained cocaine with a street value of £178,200.
The intended recipient was identified as Rose, who subsequently disappeared from the area and was eventually arrested two years later by police in London for unrelated traffic offences.
When detectives examined text messages sent by him and a US contact they discovered evidence nearly £260,000 had been transferred from London NW10 to California between February 2011 and June last year in payment for shipping cocaine.
The street value of the drugs imported during this period was estimated by police at £28.5 million, with one or two large packages arriving each week. Cobourne was found to have sent large cash transfers via female associates in London.
Police arrested several other people in London in relation to the cash tranfers, and four women and a man, all from west or north-west London, are awaiting trial at Brighton Crown Court on May 18 this year, charged with money laundering.
DC Dom Marini, of Sussex Police, said: “This has been a complex investigation which has taken over three years and has involved close co-operation with law enforcement in the UK, the United States, and Jamaica.
“It became clear we were dealing with international criminality which aimed to spread dangerous drugs in London and the Bexhill area – an avenue of supply that has now been completely stopped.”
