A brave soldier who tackled IEDs in Afghanistan used her seven-year-old child as a cover to smuggle heroin into Kent.

Ex-squaddie Naomi Thriepland, 25, drove a black BMW convertible stashed with £170,000 of drugs into Folkestone – with her child by her side.

She told customs officials she was returning from a trip to take her daughter to Disneyland, in Paris, in December 2011.

But the truth was Thriepland, pictured left, had been to Amsterdam to load up with 3.44 kilos of heroin and another 12 kilos of cutting agents.

The drugs were hidden inside the expensive car's soft top when the mother, who lives in Cumbria, stayed at a hotel.

Thriepland, who admitted drug smuggling, claimed it was the first time she had been a courier – but investigators discovered the same BMW had been driven to the continent TWICE before.

And despite being four months' pregnant, she was jailed for four years at Canterbury Crown Court.

The ex-soldier – who quit to spend more time with her daughter and to train as a beauty therapist - sat stony-faced as the prosecution told of her deception.

But she broke down when a judge praised her service to Britain for her service in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A probe into Thriepland's financial dealings revealed that despite claiming to be paid just £7-an-hour for a 15-hour weekly job, £10,500 had been transferred into her bank account.

Drugs smuggler Naomi Thriepland was caught with heroin and cutting agents

Her barrister Christopher Baur said she agreed to be paid £8,000 for the drugs run, but hadn not acted in "malice or wickedness, but rather stupidity and with an element of greed".

"The situation she finds herself in is dire because she wasn't coerced into it, but neither was she a major player in the enterprise. She did it to better conditions for her child," he added.

He said Thriepland, who served in the Army for six years including with bomb disposal teams in Afghanistan, denied making previous drugs runs to Europe – but admitted one of the trips a month earlier had been a "dummy run".

Judge Heather Norton told her: "You made that trip in order to plan the drug smuggling run – and you did what you did for financial gain.

"More than that, you took your seven-year-old child with you as some kind of family cover - putting that child at risk. You claim you became a courier to give her a better life, but that child is now likely to suffer more than you.

"You have served this country with a number of tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and in perilous positions; so whatever else can be said about you, this was certainly out of character."