A BURNLEY man serving in the Royal Navy has spoken of his part in the seizure of heroin worth £14m from drug smugglers cornered in the Indian Ocean.
Petty Officer Dave Stott, 33, was on aboard HMS Westminster, when it intercepted a boat and found more than 70 bales containing 180kg of pure heroin onboard.
The warship had scrambled a Merlin helicopter, which Dave works on as an avionics engineer, to investigate as Royal Marine Commandos streaked towards the drug runners in sea boats.
Faced with such an overwhelming display of force, the smugglers could do nothing but raise their hands above their heads and moved out on to the deck of their small ship.
The Merlin helicopter, codename Red Bull, thundered overhead while the dhow was searched from top to bottom using specialist equipment.
The huge drug haul was found in one of the ship’s fuel tanks.
Dave, whose family live in the Rosehill area, now lives in Cornwall with wife Laura and their two children and is based at 829 Naval Air Squadron, RNAS Culdrose Helston.
The former St Theodore's High pupil said: “It is good to see that for all the hard work we put into the training for such eventualities that it pays off with the seizure of a sizeable amount of drugs.
“If it keeps it off the streets of Britain then our presence out here can only be a good thing.
“We have had earlier successes with the disruption of pirate activities, off the coast of Somalia, where the Merlin helicopter and the Westminster worked well to achieve its goal.
"So far our deployment has been a major success.”
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