A police call-out to reports of a burglary led to the discovery of a huge cannabis operation at a Bradford industrial unit which could have netted criminals almost £500,000 on the streets.
When officers arrived at the scene on Dick Lane back in August 2022 they found one of the gates to the unit open with tools lying on the ground and two Albanian men had made their way onto the roof.
Prosecutor Andrew Semple said the duo failed to respond to police requests to come down initially and the police helicopter became involved in the incident. Eventually the pair came down and inside the large unit officers found three rooms which had been converted into a cannabis growing facility with a large number of lights, transformers and hundreds of potted plants.
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Bradford Crown Court heard on Tuesday that two of the rooms contained more than 650 mature cannabis plants while a “nursery” room contained a further 376 plants which would have been a follow on crop.
Recorder Andrew Smith was told that the plants had a potential yield of 57 kilograms of cannabis which could have been worth up to £494,000 if sold at street level. Serxhio Gjoshi, 25, and Voltes Rexho, 36, both admitted their involvement in the production of the cannabis on the second day of their trial last October.
Today Recorder Smith jailed Gjoshi for 32 months for his role in what the judge described as a sophisticated commercial operation which would have produced a huge amount of drugs that could have ended up on the streets.
(Image: Yorkshire Live)
“The potential profit for those who were involved in this offence further up the chain was similarly immense,” said Recorder Smith.
“That’s money that would be reinvested into other criminal enterprises and that’s cannabis that would be bought by people who will harm their own health and often commit further criminal offences to fund the purchase price of those drugs.”
Rexho, who was said to have played a lesser role than his co-accused, was jailed for 27 months and Recorder Smith said neither of the defendants had been towards the top of the chain.
The court heard heard that the two men had been living in “squalid” conditions at the unit and Gjoshi told a probation officer that he that he had been hoping to pay of the £20,000 it cost to smuggle him into this country illegally.
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