Police have charged 11 people in connection with an attempt to smuggle 22 suitcases packed with cannabis from Thailand to Birmingham. The drugs, with an estimated street value of nearly £14m, were seized at Birmingham airport in August 2024.
More than half a tonne of the class B drug was discovered inside the luggage, described by the National Crime Agency (NCA) as an “enormous amount”. All 11 suspects, aged between 21 and 35, had travelled to the UK from Thailand via Paris Charles de Gaulle airport.
Nine of the accused appeared at Birmingham magistrates court on Friday, where they were bailed until their next hearing at Birmingham crown court on 28 November 2025. Six men suspected of organising the importation remain under investigation, five of whom were arrested at addresses in Marsh Farm, Luton, and Finchley, north London, on 23 October 2024.
Kevin Broadhead, NCA branch commander, said: “This was an enormous amount of cannabis to be seized from air passengers and would have been extremely profitable for organised crime gangs had it remained undetected. The charges brought against these individuals are an important moment in our investigation, which remains ongoing.”
The seizure comes amid a sharp rise in drugs being smuggled through UK airports in suitcases. The NCA said the amount of cannabis found in such cases had tripled in under a year, with around 15 tonnes recovered by August 2024, compared with 5 tonnes in 2023 and 2 tonnes in 2022. Thailand, Canada and parts of the US remain key source countries for traffickers.
Recent high-profile cases include former Arsenal footballer Jay Emmanuel-Thomas, jailed for four years in June for orchestrating a plot involving two women caught at Stansted airport with 15kg of cannabis each. In May, 19-year-old student nurse Bella Culley was arrested at Tbilisi airport with 14kg of the drug; her family later paid £138,000 in a plea-bargain deal that could result in a two-year sentence.
