£10m heroin entered UK in 3 months: Says British newspaper report on drug smuggling from Bangladesh

Jasim Uddin Khan

A frontline UK newspaper in an investigation report yesterday said in just three months, 10 million-pound heroin coming from Bangladesh has been intercepted at British ports.

The report published in The Observer said the traffickers used new techniques to send the drugs to 'ghost' companies in UK. They used one of the most respected businesses of Bangladesh to mask their deadly trade.

Following interception of the heroin consignments, Rivington House, home to scores of legitimate small businesses in London, was revealed to be a conduit for the drugs coming from Bangladesh.

Up to last year, Rivington House was the headquarters of an obscure company called Ocean Line Foods. Then in April last year the firm disappeared.

The Observer report says there is no record of Ocean Line Foods at Companies House, the official government register of UK companies. The company has no website and left no forwarding address. It is not even clear whether it has ever existed, other than on paper. But the company's name came up in a confidential intelligence report of Bangladesh Department of Narcotics Control.

The name of M/S Bengal Bay, another UK-based company, also appears in the report as the intended recipients of the heroin consignments seized at UK ports. Located above a coffee shop on the Edgware Road, London, the import/export firm is now subject of an investigation by the Metropolitan Police Service of greater London.

Over the past year a series of ostensibly legitimate firms with links to Bangladesh have joined a bulging group of import/export firms that have attracted the attention of the London police.

The newspaper report says in total, some 140kg of heroin - worth nearly £10m once sold on to Britain's 260,000 heroin addicts - had entered the UK from Bangladesh.

It says several seizures of the drug sent by Bangladesh-based companies--Emdad Trading, Jamil International, and Green Heaven Enterprise--at different ports last year concerned the UK Customs officials. Previously, they had not considered Bangladesh to be a major conduit for heroin.

The total amount of heroin found in just a handful of seizures in three months doubled that acknowledged by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNDC) as passing between the port of Chittagong and the UK in the whole of last year, and suggested the smugglers were changing tactics.

'The seizures made in the UK in 2005 relate to an overall pattern where ethnic/language-based groups are moving product within south Asia by making many, many small runs.

The UNDC said it was clear that the Bangladeshi heroin trade was now an urgent threat, one that had caught the UK authorities off guard.

The sophisticated nature of the operation was also alarming. The export companies such as Ocean Line Foods and M/S Bengal appeared to have legitimate licences and tax identification numbers, which had been issued by the Bangladeshi authorities. They had recognised postal addresses in the UK.

Seemingly out of nowhere, a well-resourced and extensive drug-smuggling operation had sprung up on the back of a legitimate trading network.

Amid growing concern at the Foreign Office, the British High Commission in Mumbai wrote to the Bangladesh authorities asking for its Customs Intelligence and Investigation Department to investigate the trafficking.

The Bangladesh government's response in the short term was swift.

Over a four-month period the group interviewed scores of suspects, examined box-loads of import/export licences and ploughed through thousands of shipping licences during an exhaustive investigation that produced an extensive picture of Bangladesh's heroin trade to Britain and, crucially, named names.

The report said with a global workforce of 3,000, BD Foods is one of Bangladesh's most respected companies. Unfortunately for BD Foods, a number of its consignments now lie stranded in ports around the world as customs officials probe their contents.

The freeze stems from the leaking of the special committee's report, which the Bangladeshi government has yet to publish - on the grounds that its investigations are continuing.

The excuse has not stopped some critics in Bangladesh suggesting that the government is trying to protect those accused in the report.

It shows that Emdad Trading, Jamil International and Green Heaven Enterprise were owned by former employees of BD Foods.

It transpires that these were in reality 'ghost' companies that were illegally using BD Foods' VAT numbers to obtain export licences so they could ship heroin to businesses in the UK that existed only on letterheads.