A man has been jailed for smuggling £550,000 of pure heroin from Pakistan concealed inside chessboards.
Syed Naveed Shabir, 31, has been locked up for nine years after an undercover operation by the National Crime Agency.
Heroin, with 100 per cent purity, was hidden in the fabric of ten games boards.
It could only be extracted by a solvent process.
The amount imported in a parcel, which also included dried fruit, was 1,639 grams, which had a potential street value of £550,000.
The parcel, from Pakistan, was intercepted in September 2012 by the UK Border Force, who detected heroin when a small part of one of the board games was cut.
It was addressed to a house in Gainsborough Avenue, Coppice, Oldham, to a ‘Mr S Ahmed’. The name was fictitious but the address was real.
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A dummy package was prepared after the boards were removed and a National Crime Agency officer posed as a delivery man to drop it off at the address.
When he arrived he got no reply at the house so left a ‘failure to deliver’ card and a number to call.
The number had been set up by the NCA to monitor the calls of anyone requesting delivery of the package.
A call was received claiming the parcel and the undercover officer travelled to the address again.
Manchester Crown Court was told it was Shabir’s telephone number that was used to call the ‘Parcelforce’ number. His fingerprints were found on the delivery note.
The parcel was actually received by another man, Khazar Hussain, who signed the delivery sheet ‘Sataroz Ahmed’ after approaching the ‘Parcelforce driver’ when he pulled up in his van and asking if he had anything for ‘Mr S Ahmed’.
Hussain was arrested in a nearby street but later accused Shabir of setting him up and was cleared of all charges at the trial.
Pete Avery, from the NCA’s Border Policing Command, said: “This was a sophisticated concealment and demonstrates the lengths criminals go to in an effort to avoid detection. I have no doubt Shabir would have gone on to import large quantities of pure heroin, but joint work with the Border Force means he is now behind bars where he belongs.”
Gangland murder
Syed Naveed Shabir is starting his prison term three years after being found not guilty of murder.
In 2011, Shabir, Milad Finn and Liaquat Khan were cleared of the gangland killing of 21-year-old Junaid Khan.
Mr Khan, above, was killed in a hail of Mac-10 machine gun bullets as he walked to a car parked outside a doctor’s surgery in Chadderton, Oldham, in July 2009.
The defence had claimed evidence used to implicate the three in the murder related not to the killing, but a lucrative heroin deal.
