Drug smuggler hid cocaine under dry ice he said was for hospital
A drug smuggler tried to hide £22.8m worth of cocaine under dry ice by pretending it was destined for a London hospital.
Bart Verschueren, 40, was caught after a vehicle was stopped at the Coquelles border control in France, with Border Force officers discovering the 285kg of Class A drugs.
To carry out his smuggling, Verschueren had duped an innocent part-time driver who was initially arrested on 5 May 2020, but subsequently released when it was discovered he had no knowledge of the plot.
His paperwork said his consignment of dry ice was for St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, which he invented to avoid checks during the Covid-19 lockdown. The hospital was in no way connected to the dry ice.
Verschueren, of Sint-Katelijne-Waver, a municipality south of Antwerp, was convicted and jailed in Belgium for other drug trafficking offences he committed in 2020 and 2021.
He was subsequently extradited to the UK in August 2024 and charged with smuggling the 285kg of cocaine.
Despite denying the offence, he was convicted by a jury at Canterbury Crown Court in March and was jailed for 18 years on Thursday.
Jurors heard the same vehicle used for the failed smuggling attempt had successfully made it to the UK three times in the preceding weeks. He was therefore sentenced on the basis that he had trafficked at least 500kg of cocaine.
Peter Jones, NCA operations manager, said: “The NCA works at home and abroad to protect the public from the threat of Class A drugs which wreck lives and our communities.
“Bart Verschueren did everything possible to cheat justice. And he thought nothing of risking his driver’s freedom. When he knew his vehicle had been stopped, he reported his driver missing in a bid to distance himself from the importation.”
More than 100,000 drivers caught breaking 20mph limit in Wales
More than 100,000 drivers were caught breaking the 20mph speed limit in Wales, according to new data – with one motorist caught driving almost 70mph over the limit.
Latest data from road safety partnership GoSafe revealed 112,699 offences were committed up to March 2025 following the introduction of the new default speed limit in September 2023.
The Welsh government changed every road that had a 30mph limit to 20mph unless it was given an exemption by the local authority.
After the legislation was introduced GoSafe suspended 20mph enforcement to give people time to adjust and to allow for road signage to be updated.
Now, monthly data published by GoSafe has revealed a year’s worth of driving offences.
The highest speed recorded was 89mph in January 2025 in north Wales, with several cases of 88mph recorded across the country.
But the average speed recorded was about 28mph.
The number of speeding motorists peaked in August, with 7,958 offences recorded in north Wales and 7,326 in mid and south Wales.
The figures also show the number of speeding offences was lower in March 2025, 4,950 offences recorded in north Wales and 4,128 in south and mid Wales.
The most recent figures show the highest speed recorded was 62mph in mid and south Wales, while in north Wales the highest speed was 58mph in that same month.
Drivers are subject to enforcement at 26mph or over in locations where a 20mph limit applies.
The founder of the campaign group 20’s Plenty for Us, Rod King, told The Independent the figures from GoSafe were not unexpected.
He explained 88,000 speeding prosecutions occurred on 30mph roads in 2023 meaning the level of enforcement in the past year is similar to what it was previously.
He said: “I’m not shocked at all, these are big figures but it is only 5 per cent of drivers in Wales. The majority do not have a speeding ticket.
“In the first year there was a reduction in casualties on the 20mph roads, fewer people being injured and fewer deaths.”
“There is a lower risk when everyone is driving that bit slower,” he added.
Trump has made China appear a beacon of free trade
The Chinese Communist Party, apostle of free trade. In a strange new world, that was the strangest thing, as shares crashed in reaction to President Donald Trump’s opening salvo of tariffs in a global trade war.
“The market has spoken,” said the foreign ministry spokesperson, Guo Jiakun, writing in English on Facebook – which is, by the way, banned in China. No double standards there, then. Beijing can always keep a straight face when it matters.
Politically, the Chinese government can scarcely believe its luck. It has stepped forward as a voice of reason and stability in a chorus of discord to promote the false narrative that it has been a model of good behaviour since it joined the World Trade Organisation (WTO) on 11 December 2001, a date that seems destined to live in the textbooks as the peak of globalisation.
The Trump tariffs “are a typical act of unilateral bullying”, complained a spokesperson for China’s Commerce Ministry.
“This approach disregards the balance of interests achieved through years of multilateral trade negotiations and ignores the fact that the US has long gained substantial profits from international trade,” the spokesperson added.
The official news agency, Xinhua, said the tariffs were “a weapon to suppress China’s economy and trade” and told the United States to stop undermining “the legitimate development rights of the Chinese people”.
It would be a mistake to write off Chinese rhetoric. The regime of Xi Jinping is serious and its actions speak louder than words.
Clue: China has listed “legitimate development rights” as one of its “red lines” in dealing with the US. The term is code for the export-led economic model which has propelled the country to the rank of second largest economy on earth since it joined the WTO.
Understand that and you understand that for China this is existential. There could be no greater contrast to the whirlwind in Washington than the disciplined, efficiently executed responses announced by Beijing in nine statements outlining reprisals that went beyond mere numbers.
Xi himself did not deign to speak publicly, let alone do anything as vulgar as posting on social media in capital letters. The Chinese public would have thought it beneath his dignity.
Untroubled by such niceties, Trump swiftly posted to his followers online that “CHINA PLAYED IT WRONG, THEY PANICKED.”
With all due respect to the American president, that is exactly what they did not do. The Xi hit list is ominous because it is well-planned and researched. The “Red Emperor” rules a mandarin class of sophisticated operators who do nothing else but study China’s opponents using every intelligence tool at their disposal.
The easy part for China was to impose reciprocal 34 per cent tariffs on all American imports from 10 April. It also suspended six American firms from exporting to China, launched anti-dumping actions in the medical sector and targeted the US giant DuPont with a probe into potential monopoly practices.
The hard part showed just how thoroughly the Chinese had done their work. No penguin islands or weird mathematics here. They banned the export of “dual use” items, which could have military or civilian applications, to 16 US firms, all in the technology sector.
Their key move was to put export controls on seven rare earth elements “to safeguard national security”. It’s on the public record that some of these are vital to US weapons systems.
The list of rare earths included terbium, which is used to enhance the properties of specialised magnets used in guidance systems, satellites and radar. The magnets are integral to the state-of-the-art F-35 fighter, Predator drones, cruise missiles and nuclear submarines.
Then there’s dysprosium, a rare-earth element of which China controls nearly all the world’s supply. It is used to make high-grade magnets that work in super-heated conditions and is found in the newest semiconductors. Other rare earths on the list are vital to jet engine turbine blades. All will now require special export licences.
China and America are thus in a new kind of war over technology and artificial intelligence. Both Joe Biden and Trump tried to choke the supply of advanced semiconductors to Chinese manufacturers, while China is seeking to choke the supply of raw materials to America’s tech champions.
It’s not hard to see how dangerous this could get. The founder of free-trading modern Singapore, the late Lee Kuan Yew, once told me in an interview that “World War Two was caused because of empires and protectionism”.
He recalled that in the 1940s an oil embargo on Imperial Japan pushed its military leaders into war and he warned that if the West tried to isolate China economically “that is bound to lead to conflict”.
Lee was talking in the 1990s, when China stood on the threshold of globalisation. It joined the WTO only after hard-fought talks. But Charlene Barshevsky, who sealed the deal for the United States, later lamented that the Americans failed to use the WTO to punish Beijing when it broke the rules.
That created the belief that appeasement and elite inertia condemned the American working class to decline, the foundation story of Trump’s movement to Make America Great Again. So it is some irony that the Chinese have just filed a formal complaint about Trump’s tariffs – with the World Trade Organisation.
Michael Sheridan, longtime foreign correspondent and diplomatic editor of The Independent, is the author of The Red Emperor published by Headline Press at £25