British couple charged with trying to smuggle 51kg of cannabis into UK in their luggage
10 June 2025, 11:43
Two Brits have been charged with trying to smuggle cannabis worth £1m into the UK.
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Sian Warren, 34, and Daniel McDonald, 36 were arrested at Heathrow after a holiday to Thailand.
The pair were charged with importing class B drugs and appeared at Uxbridge magistrates’ court. They were bailed until a plea hearing on June 26 at Isleworth crown court.
The couple, from Salford, Greater Manchester, are reported to have gone to Thailand on holiday last month.
They are accused of brining more than 51kg of cannabis into the UK in their luggage, packed into four suitcases that the pair were carrying.
It comes as LBC revealed how South American cartels dumped over £200 million worth of cocaine into the English Channel last year to be picked up by small fishing boats and brought to shore.
Cartels release packages of cocaine, wrapped in waterproof flotation devices with GPS trackers, from cargo ships and private yachts.
British smugglers then recover the floating packages and bring them ashore on small boats.
Once on land, cocaine is sold by county lines gangs, fuelling child exploitation, gang violence, and drug addiction, an expert said.
Figures obtained by LBC show 3.5 tonnes — the equivalent of a small warehouse or lorry load, worth around £210 million — were seized by Border Force after being dropped in UK territorial waters in 2024, up from none recorded in 2022.
A Home Office source told LBC that Border Force intercepted 1.5 tonnes in a single haul in Dover in January - more than a third of the total seized in the previous 12 months.
The figures only include packages intercepted by law enforcement, with the true scale of the issue likely to be far higher.
