Man offered a motorbike and £50 a day to commit crime

A DRUG dealer recruited a runner to work for him with an offer of a motorbike and £50 a day, a court has heard.

- JASON EVANS

Harry Hassan's operation was taken down by police after they arrested a different dealer and found Hassan was his “upstream supplier” - the person who was supplying him with his stocks of drugs.

Swansea Crown Court heard police subsequently executed a series of simultaneous search warrants at addresses in a Swansea community and arrested Hassan along with his lieutenants, Callum Choudhury and Robert Maunder.

Officers also recovered a safe containing cocaine and a drugs phone the gang had been using.

Dean Pulling, prosecuting, told the court that in January this year officers in Swansea arrested a cocaine dealer by the name of Matthew Oliver, and said that from his phone detectives were able to obtain the number of his “upstream supplier”.

The court heard officers were able to identify Oliver's supplier as the defendant Hassan from the messages, and were also able to identify two others persons of interest - Choudhury and Maunder.

In April, Oliver was sentenced to 40 months in prison for being concerned in the supply of cocaine.

The prosecutor said on the morning of March 4 officers executed a series of simultaneous search warrants at addresses linked to the defendants in the Bonymaen and Winch Wen areas of Swansea.

At a bedroom in a house in Chirk Gardens in Bonymaen, officers found Hassan along with “several damaged phones” with smashed screens near a chest of drawers which was also damaged and covered in pieces of broken glass.

Another phone was found under the mattress on the bed. The court heard that although police were unable to power up the phones, they were able to recover sim cards.

The prosecutor said that at Choudhury’s home address, officers forced entry to the property and detained him as he was trying to flee through a rear door. In the kitchen, they found a black safe on the windowsill along with bags of cocaine, £440 in cash, and a set of weighing scales in a cupboard.