Truck driver who tried to smuggle £7.5MILLION worth of cocaine after arriving from Calais is jailed for 11 years

A TRUCK driver who tried to smuggle £7.5m worth of cocaine into the UK after arriving from France has been locked up for 11 years.

Miodrag Ivankovic, 45, was busted with 207lb (94kg) of the Class A drug at Dover port last September after arriving from Calais.

National Crime Agency officers cut into a pallet of boxes stashed in Ivankovic's lorry and discovered a white powder that was later confirmed to be cocaine.

Officers found Ivankovic's DNA was all over the boxes, prompting the driver to admit he tried to smuggle drugs into the country.

Ivankovic, from Banja Luka, in north Bosnia, was jailed at Canterbury Crown Court yesterday.

NCA branch commander Martin Grace said: "We and our Border Force partners have taken a significant consignment of cocaine out of the supply chain.

"The organised crime group behind the plot have lost profits they would have ploughed back into more offending and they have lost a trusted smuggler.

"Drugs bring misery to UK communities and the NCA will continue to do everything it can to combat the threat."

The bust comes after German trucker Kawus Rafiei, 57, was jailed for 19 years in March after attempting to smuggle half a tonne of cocaine worth £38million via the same port.

Border Force officers scanned Rafiei's lorry and detected an "anomaly" with his load, the National Crime Agency said.

Two shrink-wrapped stacks of tyres within the trailer unit were opened, revealing packages of cocaine weighing 1,036 pounds (470 kilos).

Earlier this month, two gangsters were jailed after they were caught smuggling £480,000 worth of cocaine inside sausage boxes.

Cops had Eyaldas Stanionis, 52, and Arunas Zemaitis, 49, bang to rights as they did a deal involving the boxes at an M25 service station.

Lorry driver Zemaitis had earlier arrived from France with a bag for Stanionis.

Kent officers then followed Stanionis for 30 miles to a car park in Chatham, where they found three food boxes with Dutch sausage branding — each containing a kilo block of cocaine.

Amphetamines, cannabis and three mobile phones were also found at Stanionis’s home in Rye, East Sussex.

Zemaitis was nicked a week later trying to board a ferry in Dover.