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Drug smuggler jailed again

Laura Kenny
6/ 3/2008

A FORMER Middleton pub landlord and cocaine trafficker who had his conviction quashed by the Court of Appeal has been sent back to jail.

Peter Charles Smith, who used to run the Barber's Arms in Rhodes, was sentenced to three years and four months in prison for smuggling more than £500,000 worth of illegal drugs after being convicted following a retrial.

Smith, 65, was originally sentenced to 10 years in jail for bringing eight kilos of cocaine and more than 42 kilos of cannabis resin into the country in 2004.

But the Appeal Court quashed his conviction and Smith, of Wellens Way, Rhodes, was freed on bail when they ordered there should be a second trial.

Jailing him for the second time, Judge Griffiths-Jones QC, at Maidstone Crown Court, told Smith that the offence was very serious indeed. The judge took into account he had already served the equivalent of four years in prison and had "enjoyed" about a year of freedom on bail before he was re-convicted.

At his retrial at Canterbury Crown Court in December, Smith, admitted smuggling cannabis but claimed he knew nothing about the cocaine.

The court heard Smith was arrested by customs officers after cocaine valued at £416,000 and cannabis worth £99,000 was discovered hidden in a compartment behind the front seats of his Peugeot van as he entered Dover in 2004.

The officers found Smith's fingerprints on the cannabis packets but not the cocaine.

Smith claimed he met a man in a bar shortly before he was due to go across the Channel on a booze run and was offered between £1,000 and £2,000 to bring back cannabis.

When he arrived in France, he said, he was told to drive to Antwerp, in Belgium, and from there two men then drove him to an industrial estate near Amsterdam where the other men cut blocks of cannabis resin down to smaller sizes to fit into the van's hidden compartment.

Smith, who once served in the army and later won an award for saving a child from drowning, claimed the men could have loaded the cocaine while he was away from the van.

Passing sentence at Maidstone Crown Court , Judge Griffith-Jones told Smith: "The jury by its verdict plainly rejected the story you advanced. I have absolutely no doubt you knew full well what you were about when you brought the two categories of drugs into the country."