THE fourth member of an organised crime gang who tried to smuggle £26.5 million of cocaine through Watchet Marina has been jailed.

Thirty-eight-year-old Albanian national Melios Delvina appeared before Judge Paul Cook in Taunton Crown Court on Monday (December 22).

Delvina had pleaded guilty to a charge relating to the importation of cocaine.

He was sentenced to 10 years and seven months in prison and ordered to pay a victim surcharge of £228 for his part in the drug trafficking enterprise.

Three other members of the gang were jailed by the same judge in November.

Raymond and Craig Nuttall, aged 47 and 51, and both from Preston, were sentenced to jail terms of 11 years and three months and 11 years and two months, respectively.

Greek national Anestis Tsepa, aged 24, who also pleaded guilty to possession of a firearm and ammunition, was given a 16-year term of imprisonment.

The gang were caught in a National Crime Agency operation after using a rigid hulled inflatable boat (RHIB) to go out to sea to collect drugs dropped into the Bristol Channel by somebody on board a passing merchant ship.

They had told the marina manager they were in Watchet for a fishing expedition, but NCA officers were keeping watch on them and swooped in the early hours of July 30 as the drugs were being offloaded from the RHIB into a van on the slipway.

Delvina claimed he was unemployed and had taken some work to unload items from a boat into a van but did not have any knowledge of the drugs inside.

NCA officers found 14 packages, inside which were 322 smaller packages each containing a kilogramme of 89 per cent pure cocaine.

The ‘street value’ of the drugs was put at more than £26 million.