Smugglers found guilty after biggest ever cocaine haul worth £500m found off Scottish coast
The haul was roughly the equivalent of the total amount of cocaine seized in England and Wales in an average year
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Two men have been found guilty of smuggling the largest haul of cocaine ever seized in the UK.
Mumin Sahin and Emin Ozmen were found guilty of the £500m operation to smuggle more than three tonnes of cocaine at the High Court in Glasgow.
Co-accused Kayacan Dalgakiran, Mustafa Guven, Umit Colakel and Ibrahim Dag were found not proven by majority verdict.
In Scotland, juries can return a verdict of “not proven” in additional to “guilty” and “not guilty”.
The drugs were found inside the ship MV Hamal about 100 miles off the coast of Aberdeen in April 2015.
Inside the hold was the largest cocaine haul ever found at sea in Europe, and drug enforcement officers said the scheme was one of the most sophisticated they had ever seen.
The tugboat, which was registered in Tanzania, had sailed from Istanbul to Tenerife and then onto the North Sea where it was stopped by Royal Navy frigate HMS Somerset and Border Force cutter Valiant with the drugs onboard.
Sahin, 47, and Ozmen, 51, both originally from Turkey, were found guilty of knowingly carrying and concealing the cocaine between 20 February and 23 April 2015 and being concerned in the supplying cocaine between 21 and 23 April 2015.
Dalgakiran, 64, Guven, 48, Colakel, 39, and Dag, 48, were acquitted of the smuggling and supply charges by the jury of 14 men and women.
Lord Kinclaven has deferred sentencing until 12 August.
The Border Force and the National Crime Agency (NCA) had been tipped off by French customs officials that a ship was travelling around the UK with a significant amount of drugs.
The ship had turned off its Automated Identification System (AIS), meaning it could not be tracked electronically, so it had been spotted by “eyes in the sky” scouring the Atlantic and the North Sea.
When the boat was stopped, unarmed officers boarded and steered it to Scotland, detaining the crew - including the cook - when it reached UK waters.
Once it was docked in Aberdeen a welded plate was found inside protecting a dry void within a ballast tank.
It took two Border Force officers two hours to cut through the steel with a household drill before they found an access hatch to the drugs which were hidden behind a medicine cabinet bolted to the wall of the upstairs accommodation.
Border Force director Murdo MacMillan said: "The ship had been specifically adapted to conceal this void. It's effectively a tank within a tank.
"This was very sophisticated. I don't think there's many people who would rebuild or adapt a vessel to the degree that this had been done."
John McGowan, of NCA Border Policing Command in Scotland, said the haul was “five times bigger than the largest Scottish seizure on land” and only slightly smaller than the total haul seized by enforcement officers in England and Wales for the whole of 2014/15.
He said the seizure had removed a significant drugs mule from the sea: "That vessel, not necessarily with the same crew, has made similar journeys. That's known from old AIS tracking and customs records."
Plans for the ship, which was built in 1979, show the void was not part of the original design but officials believe it had been there “for some time”.
Additional reporting by PA