A cannabis courier who claimed he couldn’t smell his £130,000 illegal cargo because he’d just had COVID has been jailed for more than a year.
Police initially activated blue lights to stop a Toyota Prius driven by 40-year-old Quynh Thai on the M6 close to Southwaite at around 12.30pm on September 9.
But a pursuit began after Thai sped away and he was eventually detained in the Durdar area close to Carlisle.
After noting a string smell of cannabis, police searched the vehicle and found 13kg of cannabis in vacuum-sealed packages within large laundry bags in the boot. This had an estimate potential street value of £130,000.
Thai told police he had entered the UK illegally in 2014, and been offered £200 by an unidentified male in an Asian food shop in Manchester to drive a vehicle to an address in Carlisle.
“He claimed he was told it was medicine and food,” Gerard Rogerson, prosecuting, said of the drugs haul. “Asked if he had smelled a strong smell of cannabis, he said he had had COVID three weeks before and couldn’t smell it.”
Thai, a Vietnamese national of no fixed abode, admitted possessing the class B drug with intent to supply. This put him in breach of a suspended jail term he was given by Greater Manchester magistrates last November for cannabis production.
Jailing Thai for a total of 14 months, Judge Nicholas Barker told him of his latest offence: “You fled from the police initially. I am quite satisfied that was because you knew exactly what was in the car and you knew the reason why you were driving it.”
