A van driver has been jailed after he smuggled more than £8m of cocaine and heroin in packages labelled 'BBC' and 'Rolls-Royce' into the UK.

The 95kg haul of class A drugs was discovered stuffed inside a mattress by Border Force officers at Dover docks in the Polish-registered LGV driven by Vlad Shtefuriak.

Canterbury Crown Court heard the mattress was so inflated that the authorities initially feared it was filled with people.

However, once cut open, they discovered it was stuffed with brown-taped packages, each 1inch deep and stacked four high, containing 75kg of 80% purity cocaine with a street value of £6m, and 20kg of heroin, with a purity of 56% and worth £2million.

Shtefuriak denied any knowledge of his illicit cargo but was unanimously convicted by a jury on Friday (January 19) of two charges of drug smuggling.

They heard the large van arrived at the docks shortly before 6am on June 16 last year and raised suspicions when it headed for the inbound freight lane despite travelling on a tourist ticket.

The 25-year-old told officials he had no load onboard, having left Poland for the UK to collect Jet Skis and deliver them back to Warsaw.

But when his sleeping area was checked they noticed the "very inflated" mattress, said prosecutor Christopher May.

Inside were 75 cocaine packages and 40 heroin packages, emblazoned with logos including 'BBC', 'Rolls-Royce' and 'PSG'.

Shtefuriak, who is a tiler by trade, was arrested and when interviewed said he had been asked by a man also called 'Vlad' to collect two Jet Skis from the UK for which he would be paid 300 Euros.

He claimed he only threw his belongings onto the mattress but a photo of him laying in the sleeping area was later found on his phone. It had been taken about seven hours before he was stopped.

There were also no messages relating to Jet Skis, and documents purporting to their collection from a firm in Littlehampton, West Sussex, proved false.

Not only did the company have no knowledge of such an order but the fake English paperwork also bore the Polish word for invoice - 'Fakturowo' - at the bottom.

Mr May added that online advertising had also been used "to try to create a plausible cover story for what was always to be a drug smuggling run" in which Shtefuriak played an important role.

"Given the quantity of the drugs, this was clearly part of an organised criminal operation to smuggle drugs, which, if successful, would have generated a great deal of money," he told jurors.

"If the defendant had used the sleeping pod, he would have been bound to have noticed that the mattress was unusual as it was stuffed with packages.

"The prosecution say that is a risk that those involved with organising a high value importation such as this would not wish to take.

"And there would be no need to take such a chance when there are clearly drivers who will take the risk of smuggling for the chance to earn more money."

The prosecutor continued that the "sham" paperwork demonstrated Shtefuriak was heading for some other location where the drugs would be off-loaded.

"The defendant was knowingly involved in this importation; he was playing the vital role of driving the vehicle and he knew that he was involved in smuggling drugs," said Mr May.

After the verdicts had been delivered, Shtefuriak's barrister told the court his client would now miss out on many years of his recently-born child's life through his "naivety".

But on jailing him for 15 years, Judge Alison Russell said he only had his own "deliberate and foolish choices" made out of greed to blame.

She added he also told "a pack of lies" once his "less than innocent cargo" had been intercepted.

"The officer saw the mattress was inflated and this immediately aroused his suspicion. It was so clearly out of the ordinary and so deep that he even thought it may have contained people," said the judge.

"When he felt the mattress it was solid and he cut through the protector to immediately see a large number of brown tape packages.

"It is clear that the depth of the mattress, so overly inflated, must have been clearly and evidently out of the ordinary as it left little, if any, space, for its proper use.

"It beggars belief that you had no idea that something illicit was contained therein."

Adding that drug smuggling was not a victimless crime as it "caused misery, encouraged criminality, and destroyed society", Judge Russell told Shtefuriak: "You are the author of your own misfortune.

"You, through your deliberate and foolish choices, have put yourself in a position where your child is deprived of the presence of a father and your partner deprived of the presence of a husband."

Speaking after sentencing, National Crime Agency senior investigating officer Daren Nicholls said: “The organised crime networks involved in drug supply rely on complicit drivers like Shtefuriak to move their illicit cargo across international borders.

“Smugglers like him play a crucial role in a much bigger picture.

“Working with partners like Border Force we are determined to do all we can to disrupt drug trafficking networks and in this case we have denied them both significant profits and a means of bringing more drugs in.”