A Kent man is among a gang to be jailed for smuggling £35 million of cocaine to the UK by boat.

Stephen Lloyd-Jones, Kursat Kizilkaya and Tiamo Zanaj were found guilty of a conspiracy to bring the Class A into the country after a five-week trial concluded last week.

Lloyd-Jones, from Folkestone, and Zanaj, 33, from Ilford, were sentenced on Wednesday to 24 years and 22 years imprisonment respectively.

Kizilkaya, 33, will be sentenced at a later date.

The trio were caught by police having returned to Eastbourne with 350kg of cocaine on a boat used to collect their illicit haul from a cargo ship in the English Channel.

They were part of a wider criminal enterprise to smuggle an enormous quantity of cocaine into the country in an operation that took weeks of preparation and planning.

Lloyd-Jones played a leading role and was referred to as the captain of the boat. He was responsible for sourcing everything needed to receive drugs from a large container ship in the Channel, just north of Guernsey, under the cover of darkness in February 2023.

He purchased the Well Plumbed, a 35ft Kingfisher Sport Explorer boat, for £100,000 and kitted it out with a crane capable of lifting a ton in weight, floatation devices, radar equipment, navigation devices, Wi-Fi, a satellite telephone and spare fuel tanks.

The 56-year-old Kent man was also given instructions on how to communicate with the cargo ship using coded signals from a laser pen.

Images found on Zanaj’s phone demonstrated how the cocaine had been wrapped in 1kg blocks before being loaded into waterproof holdalls.

Each holdall contained 25 blocks of cocaine, with 14 holdalls subsequently loaded into giant white sacks that were collected from the cargo ship and towed behind Lloyd-Jones’ boat.

Despite evidence of the significant preparations made to facilitate this operation, only a fraction of the expected quantity actually made it to shore having lost at least half of the load in rough seas during the night. The difficult weather conditions caused damage to the boat and issues with the winch, as well as injuries to the crew, with Lloyd-Jones suffering serious injuries to his fingers.

Despite losing more than half of their expected haul to the sea, the 350kg of cocaine found on the boat by police had a wholesale value of between £8 million and £9 million, and a street value of potentially £35 million.

Paul Goddard, of the Crown Prosecution Service, said: “Stephen Lloyd-Jones and Tiamo Zanaj tried to minimise their role in this serious criminal enterprise by suggesting they were acting under duress, but there can be no doubt that they were recruited as trusted individuals for their expertise and in return for significant monetary gain.

“Lloyd-Jones, a self-confessed master mariner, spun a web of lies whilst sourcing the equipment needed to smuggle such a large quantity of drugs, telling people that he was using the boat for commercial diving, or needed equipment for family members that were crab fisherman.

“None of this was true at all – he and Zanaj knew exactly what they were doing and had an agreed mission to smuggle a vast amount of cocaine into the UK which, if successful, would have been worth tens of millions of pounds.

“The Crown Prosecution Service will continue to work tirelessly to interrupt any and all activity by organised criminal gangs and ensure they face the consequences of their actions.”