Britons Held in Costa Del Crime Hashish Raid

Spanish police said yesterday they had arrested 11 Britons and captured a hashish haul with a total value of £7.5m as they carried out two operations against British drugs gangs on the Costa del Sol.

Armed police acted against the gangs in Alhaurin de la Torre, 12 miles west of Malaga, and Estepona, which lies a further 23 miles down the same coast, in separate raids over the past fortnight.

"A major blow has been dealt to those groups whose aim is to supply the British drugs market from bases on our coast," a Spanish police spokesman in Malaga said. He said the operation against the UK drugs gangs on what is sometimes known as the "costa del crime", which has netted 3 tonnes of hashish so far, was continuing yesterday.

Police said they were forced to fire at one vehicle containing three alleged members of one of the gangs, after the driver had refused to stop when a police car tried to block his path.

The bullet punctured the front left-hand tyre and the driver, Grant Mureen, 35, and two passengers, Ford Leonard Sexton, 47, and Alan Knitter, 26, were arrested.

Spanish police have alleged that Mr Mureen and Mr Sexton were in charge of buying the drugs for the gang and that Mr Knitter was their minder.

They say that the three were part of a gang of seven men which had been preparing to send 1.8 tonnes of hashish to Britain and other parts of Europe. The hashish was packed into cardboard boxes of children's clothing and was being loaded into a lorry when police burst into a warehouse in Alhaurin de la Torre, they said.

"The rest of the detainees were taken by surprise as they were loading the pallets with the cardboard boxes into the lorry," the spokesman said.

He said that Steven Ward, the 38-year-old lorry driver, had been carrying just over £1,000 in euros. The other three detainees were named as Colin Newman, 53, Tony Watts, 51, and Joey West, 29.

Police said the drugs would have come from Morocco and had probably been smuggled on to local beaches.

The second police operation, carried out two weeks ago but made public yesterday, was sparked by the suspicious activities of a group of British workers who appeared to be doing industrial carpentry work behind the closed doors of a warehouse in Estepona.

When police raided the warehouse they discovered 1.2 tonnes of hashish, mostly hidden inside 300 wooden beams. The 3kg bags of drugs had been coated in resin to make them more difficult to detect before being packed into the beams.

Those arrested were named as Nicholas Andrew Clenshaw, 32, James Stearn, 26, James Christopher Brannan, also 26, and an unnamed 16-year-old.

"Drug smuggling groups that operate on the Costa del Sol often have their own infrastructure, allowing them to buy, store and transport the drugs via land or sea," a police spokesman said. "They take advantage of the free circulation of people and goods and the elimination of frontier controls to build up their networks."

Spanish courts were reported to have placed the 11 detainees under formal investigation.