ONE STING TOO FAR

Last week record seizures of heroin were announced. That only confirms it
as the drug of choice for the Nineties - and not only in Britain.

IN THE world of drugs, the double-cross is a crime that often results in
death for the perpetrator. For Her Majesty's Customs and Excise, the
penalty is not execution, but it may spell the death of secret smuggling
operations aimed at catching dealers.

Hussain Shah, a 45-year-old entrepreneur, is the man claiming he was
double-crossed. He says that British Drugs Liaison Officers - known as DLOs
- - working in Islamabad in Pakistan forced him to entrap potential drug
dealers. The quid pro quo was the dropping of a previous heroin-smuggling
charge. But Hussain Shah was jailed, and now he wants revenge.

His claim would sound far-fetched, except that it has already caused the
collapse of at least two cases brought by Customs and Excise against
alleged drug smugglers and it may result in appeals against more than a
dozen other convictions.

Shah's claims form part of an organised campaign by defence solicitors to
discredit "controlled deliveries" - a method by which informants work with
Customs officers abroad in order to fly heroin into the UK with the
specific object of catching the dealer who buys drugs to sell on the
street. Shah's allegations, along with apparent similarities in the way
convictions were secured in other cases, have resulted in a top-level
inquiry into the operations of Customs' Drugs Liaison Officers operating in
Pakistan - probably the world's most important location for heroin-traffic
and its prevention.

Drugs Liaison Officers, who are attached to the British High Commission in
Islamabad, are there to identify drugs bound for the UK before they depart.
They do this either through shared intelligence or when informants walk in
off the street. Informants who agree to go through with drug deals under
the control of DLOs get rewards of up to #1,000 for every kilo of heroin
seized at the British end of the operation - a substantial bounty in
Pakistan. This is a tried and trusted method with a 20-year history. Now
lawyers are arguing that people are being set up in deals that would never
have taken place without the encouragement of Customs and Excise, and that
they sometimes involve drugs provided by Customs officials themselves.

HUSSAIN Shah says it all started in 1995 when he bought 3kg of heroin in an
operation he describes as a Customs and Excise set-up. Before he could be
arrested for his part in the deal, he fled to Pakistan where he grew
homesick for his family of eight children and his grocery businesses in
Bradford and Leeds. His solicitor, Mohammed Rafique, says: "After a while,
he was approached by Customs officials who said they could help him to
return to England if he helped set up a few 'jobs'. They said that each job
would be taken into account if he went home to face the music. But they let
him down."

Shah's story is that he helped by identifying potential buyers in the UK -
drug dealers who were either already involved, or, so say their lawyers,
those stupid enough to be lured in. It is understood that Shah claims he
initiated a number of operations from Pakistan. But when he returned to
Britain, he was arrested and jailed for the offence from which he fled in
1995.

Shah's handlers - assuming they exist - might have thought that was the
last they would hear of him. They were not so lucky. In the past six
months, two cases involving 55kg of heroin with a street value of #5.5m
have collapsed because Shah offered to give evidence for the five
defendants involved. He is appealing against his own conviction, and there
are rumours that charges against alleged drug smugglers in Scotland may be
dropped because Customs officials fear what Shah might say. Appeals may
also be launched in a raft of other cases in which purchasers of
"controlled deliveries" were convicted.

MOHAMMED Rashid, 37, from Bradford is among those who claim they were
entrapped. Along with two associates named Waheed Rehman and Fiaz Khan,
Rashid was charged in connection with the importation of 35kg of heroin
which had actually been brought into the country by Customs officers last
year.

Rashid and his associates were the victim of a tip-off by an informant
known as Abid. Under the control of Customs, Abid posed as the courier of
the drugs and, according to Rashid, also offered advice on how to finance
their purchase. Rashid says now: "I shouldn't have become involved but the
deal seemed too good to be true. I had been in trouble for supplying a
small amount of heroin in 1992. I was an addict then but I had been clean
ever since. A friend told me about this chance to buy 35kg of heroin for
#10,000 a kilo, and the price is normally #20,000. It would be worth #3.5m
on the streets.

"My father had just died, I have seven children and no job. I know it was
wrong, but I was tempted. That is what they do; they put temptation in your
way. We were all on the dole and we couldn't even afford it. Abid said his
people in Pakistan wanted #40,000 up front. When we told him we couldn't
raise that much, he gave us a 2kg 'sample' to sell so we could raise the
deposit." The sample was never recovered. According to defence lawyers,
Abid was paid a #28,000 fee by Customs but charges against Rashid, Waheed
Rehman and Fiaz Khan were dropped when Shah offered to claim in court that
the men had been set up.

Philip Sweeney, Mr Waheed's solicitor, says: "The evidence against the
three looked pretty overwhelming the way it was presented. Under the Police
and Criminal Evidence Act you can apply for evidence gained by entrapment
to be ruled inadmissible, but it usually isn't. The men were looking at 15
to 20 years. Shah's involvement was a godsend."

THIS CASE shows how Customs and Excise can manipulate drug import and
seizure figures to help make the argument for more funds for the fight
against drugs. Even though Mr Rashid and partners were arrested in Leeds,
their case was transferred to Newcastle, where it provoked local headlines
about record seizures in the North-east - despite the fact that the drugs
had been imported courtesy of Customs and the Pakistani Anti-Narcotics
Force.

In a similar case in Glasgow, DLOs and their Pakistani counterparts
organised a controlled delivery of 18kg of heroin. When the drugs were
seized from the dealer who bought them, a Customs spokesman said: "This was
a huge amount of heroin and a tremendous result for our investigators." In
fact, one of their officers had accompanied the delivery on a scheduled
passenger flight.

Senior Customs sources say enquiries so far have found no impropriety. And
they argue that legitimate work could be undermined by lawyers latching on
to Shah's willingness to give evidence.

None the less, defence lawyers in two other cases have begun working
together after uncovering another, potentially serious, anomaly relating to
four Asian men convicted of drugs offences in 1994 and 1995. They have
found that the drugs their clients bought in separate cases from couriers
controlled by Customs have a curious provenance.

DLO statements relating to each case detail meticulously how the drugs were
given to their informant by would-be suppliers in Pakistan. They were
handed over to drugs officers in Islamabad, who then brought them over to
the UK in a controlled delivery.

But lawyers have discovered that the drugs in both cases were given the
same Customs serial number - consignment 3998 - even though they were
supposed to have been received from different informants in different
locations on different days. Two of the men supposed to have received them
were jailed for 14 years, the other two for nine years.

Customs sources say their enquiries suggest there may be a simple
explanation for the anomaly. One senior official seriously hopes so.

"Our men out there do very dangerous and very useful work in catching the
smugglers in this country," he said. "Our methods have been very successful
for the past 20 years but all that work could be undermined if the
criminals bring down the system of controlled deliveries. As far as they're
concerned, it's getting in the way of business."

In the East End it's #2 a score

CUSTOMS and Excise boast about last year's record hauls of 1.7 tonnes of
heroin (an increase of nearly 150 per cent on 1996), writes Hilary Clarke,
but they cannot prevent the use of it reaching epidemic proportions on the
run-down council estates in Tower Hamlets in the East End of London. And as
the price of heroin falls so that, for the price of a pint of lager, four
schoolchildren can get high, so does the age of users.

"In Tower Hamlets, heroin is becoming the first drug children try," said
one emergency drugs helpline worker, who couldn't be named for professional
reasons. "It used to be cannabis, now it's smack. Kids are dying. Leah
Betts and other isolated cases of dodgy ecstasy tablets get all the
publicity but in most inner-London boroughs we have a crazy epidemic of one
of the most addictive drugs known to mankind."

Charlie, 16, from Bethnal Green, is undergoing a treatment programme that
he hopes will end his two-year addiction to heroin. "Everyone is taking it,
blacks, whites, Asians. I know kids as young as 10 or 11 already addicted
to smack," he says.

While the statistical evidence is slim, the physical evidence is there for
anyone who cares to look. Stepney's Ocean Estate is notorious as a centre
for the sale and use of heroin in the East End, and the stairwells of any
one of its blocks are littered with tin-foil stained with black.

A few years ago, heroin was injected or sniffed. Now the preferred method
is to smoke the fumes produced by burning the drug through rolls of tin
foil. This has become more popular as the purity of the drug sold on the
streets has improved.

Parents in these communities complain the police are not doing enough to
arrest dealers, many of whom sell their drugs from cars parked outside
estates and schools. But the police struggle to catch just a few of the big
fish. Charlie claims he knows people that have been found by the police to
be in possession of heroin, but are allowed to go free in exchange for
dealers' numbers.

According to Judith Cooper, Tower Hamlets council's substance misuse and
drugs action co-ordinator, "Tower Hamlets has a reputation as the cheapest
place to buy heroin in London. It demonstrates market forces because
economically it is bottom of the scale as well."