Cocaine worth £700k and gun found in man's garden

Drugs worth £700,000 were found at the apartment in Hertfordshire

A man caught with 13kg (28lbs) of cocaine and a pistol has been jailed for 11 years.

Albanian Irakli Rustemi, 33, was an illegal immigrant and had absconded from Immigration Enforcement, police discovered.

In a chalet in the garden of a house at Penton Drive in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, officers found a 9mm pistol and cocaine worth £700,000.

Rustemi pleaded guilty to possessing a class A drug with intent to supply, possessing a firearm and possessing ammunition, and was jailed at St Albans Crown Court on Wednesday.

Irakli Rustemi had absconded from Immigration Enforcement, police said

Officers from the Organised Crime Partnership (OCP) – a specialist unit comprised of Metropolitan Police and National Crime Agency officers - had instructed Cambridgeshire Police to stop a car on the A10 at Buntingford, last October.

They were working on intelligence suggesting the occupants had access to a firearm.

A pistol was found inside a wardrobe, alongside ammunition

When Rustemi was pulled over, officers found a key in the car which opened an apartment in the garden of a Cheshunt house, where OCP officers discovered a 9mm Makarov self-loading pistol and six rounds of ammunition in a magazine which had been wrapped in a towel and placed in a wardrobe.

They also found cocaine with an estimated street value of £700,000.

The cocaine was mostly separated into 1kg blocks, but was also found in smaller quantity bags.

Following his sentencing, Andrew Tickner, from the OCP, said: "[Our] primary mission is to protect the public from dangerous offenders like Irakli Rustemi, whose crime group has now been dismantled."