COLLARED

Bob the dog helps bust drug gang’s £45m MDMA plot

- TOM PETTIFOR

A FRENCH bulldog called Bob has helped collar a drug gang and foil their plot to smuggle more than 70 stone of MDMA to Australia.

They hid the Class A drug, also known as ecstasy, with a street value of £45million in the arm of a mechanical digger.

But the traffickers were unaware the encrypted network they used had been hacked by the National Crime Agency, in part of the UK's biggest-ever organised crime probe.

phone And one of the gang sent an image of Bob which included the dog's tag and the phone DIGGER PLOYE number of the crook's partner, which would help the NCA catch him.

Yesterday, at Kingston crown court in South West London, six men were jailed for a total of 140 years for the smuggling operations.

One plotter, Danny Brown, 55, sent the shot of his pet anonymously to co-conspirator Stefan Baldauf, 62, via EncroChat, the phone network.

They did not use their real identities and investigators later had to prove their code names, or handles, were them.