A British mother and her daughter have been arrested at a Spanish airport after allegedly trying to fly back to the UK with 42 kilos of cocaine in their luggage.
The pair, aged 47 and 19, allegedly posed as tourists visiting the east coast city of Valencia for Easter before attempting to return to Britain with suitcases full of the class-A drug.
They were held on Thursday night last week, just before the start of the main Easter activities and around three days after their arrival.
The cocaine had been packed into two suitcases inside 23 packets and in tablet form, according to local press reports.
The pair held are said to have been booked on a flight back to Birmingham.
They were remanded to a local jail after appearing before a judge in Quart de Poblet, a municipality near Valencia which is the closest to Valencia’s Manises Airport.
Police have not yet made any official comment but are expected to do so later today.
At the end of May Spanish police went public with the arrests of a British couple aged 33 and 34 held at the same airport after 33 kilos of marijuana was found in their luggage.
They claimed at the time they were tourists coming from Thailand.
The pair were remanded in custody after suspicious officers picked them out from other passengers arriving because of their ‘nervous and evasive attitude.’
Confirming the latest arrests at the time, a spokesman for the Civil Guard in Valencia said: ‘The Civil Guard and Tax Agency have arrested two people on a flight from France for carrying more than 33 kilograms of vacuum-packed marijuana in their suitcases.
‘The two passengers, a British man and woman, were displaying a nervous and evasive attitude and were stopped before they reached customs control.
‘They said they were coming from Thailand and were entering Spain as tourists and had nothing to declare.
‘Following standard procedure, their suitcases were put through a specialist scanner which showed up a large amount of organic material in both but no clothes or personal belongings.
‘The cases were subsequently opened in their presence and found to contain a substance which tested positive in the cannabis-marijuana drugs test.
‘The drugs were subsequently confirmed to be 33,540 grams of marijuana.
‘The British man and woman were subsequently arrested for a crime of drug trafficking and remanded in prison following a court appearance.’
It was not immediately clear this morning if they remain behind bars.
In January last year an OnlyFans model was arrested at Barcelona’s El Prat airport after travelling from Thailand with more than 34 kilos of cannabis in her suitcase.
Clara Wilson, from Huthwaite, Nottinghamshire, was later jailed for three years after admitting trying to smuggle nearly £200,000 worth of drugs into Spain.
She put her hands up to wrongdoing as part of a plea bargain deal after being offered a more lenient punishment ahead of her full trial.
Last October Brit Martin Renwick Hunter, 69, was jailed for nearly four years after being convicted of trying to smuggle almost £100,000 of drugs onto a Spanish car ferry.
He was stopped as he tried to board the Algeciras-bound vessel in Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta on July 13 last year.
