POLICE ON ALERT OVER CARDBOARD BOX HEROIN

Criminals are planning to flood Scotland with heroin by soaking cardboard
boxes with the deadly drug.

The scheme has been hatched by criminals to get round the increasingly
tight Customs checks at airports and ferry terminals.

Police and Customs officers across Scotland have been put on alert
following a warning by the National Criminal Intelligence Service over the
heroin shipments from Pakistan.

The Class-A drug is turned into liquid form and saturated into boxes
containing items such as electric fans or lighters.

After passing through Customs, the boxes are collected at the airport and
taken to a makeshift laboratory - usually a factory unit - where the heroin
is squeezed out using industrial presses.

One drugs officer with Strathclyde Police said: "This appears to be a very
simple, yet clever, way of smuggling drugs into the country.

"It does not require a great deal of skill or knowledge to remove the
heroin from the cardboard and the process only takes a few hours."

No "cardboard box" heroin has been seized in Scotland so far, but last
month three members of an English gang were jailed at Birmingham Crown
Court for smuggling #50,000 of heroin in this way

The mastermind, Naseer Ahmed, 35, from Walsall, West Midlands, escaped
arrest and is believed to have fled to Pakistan.

Ahmed is said to be the brains behind plans to flood millions of pounds of
high-grade heroin into Britain soaked in boxes.

On arrival in the UK, the boxes are soaked in large barrels with a salt
solution until the cardboard becomes very soft.

The mushy residue is heroin in a paste form. This is then dried using hot-
air machines before being pressed into half-kilo blocks