Edmond Okoli denied smuggling cocaine into Scotland

Edmond Okoli, 43, turned up to collect the crates of cheap crockery from Peru - using a fake driving licence as ID.Security guard Okoli, of Tyrrell Road, London, denied smuggling cocaine into Scotland in November 2005 - along with others - and being concerned in the supply of the drug.He told an earlier trial he had been offered £500 to pick up the artefacts and knew nothing about drugs. He named those he claimed were really to blame.But a jury rejected his story and found him guilty, by a majority.The High Court in Edinburgh heard today that Okoli felt "justifiably aggrieved" that he was left to carry the can.Solicitor advocate Jim Keegan, defending, said Okoli had never been in any kind of trouble before.The earlier trial heard how police and customs officers had earlier searched through the vases and other pottery. They drew a blank - until they turned their attention to the packaging itself.Some of the slats making up six wooden crates revealed a suspicious shadow when x-rayed.A jury watched a video of what happened next.A hole was bored into one of the lengths of wood, followed by a probe which flicked out traces of white powder.The searchers then noticed three lengths of wood in each of the six crates was a slightly different colour and all had been hollowed out to take packages of cocaine.The wooden boxes were loaded onto a white Toyota van. But by them customs officers had seized the cocaine and hidden a microphone in one of the crates.As the van drove away the eavesdropping bug picked up the sound of someone singing about drugs in a foreign language.
Language expert Godson Echebima was asked to listen to the voices the bug picked up and said he heard "joyful singing" .Mr Echebima of London-based IOL Language Service told the trial that he identified the language on recordings as Igbo, spoken in eastern Nigeria.There were two Igbo voices on the recording, he said. Snatches of almost inaudible conversation could be heard against a background of a vehicle starting up and what seemed to be a telephone call.A transcript shown to the jury described part of the recording as "brief joyful singing" and translated the words as "he who's got the drug is going ..."The Toyota van was stopped as it headed south on the M74.Detective Sergeant Kenneth Simpson of Strathclyde Police drug squad told the court that the drug was of very high purity and could easily be doubled in quantity before being sold on the streets for between pounds £40 and £50 a gramme.
The detective praised the ingenuity of the smugglers. "It looked just like a plank of wood. It had been very professionally done," he said.Detective Sergeant James Wallace of the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency said the search at Edinburgh Airport was part of "Operation Horus"Last year Okoli stood trial on the same charges with the two men he claimed were really responsible.
Richard Taylor, 45, of Edinburgh and Chibuike Chukwu, 28, of London were cleared by a jury then. The proceedings against Okoli were temporarily abandoned because his lawyer was taken ill.He had come back to Edinburgh to face a new trial, on his own.

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