A dancer who was caught smuggling half a kilo of cocaine hidden in a suitcase of designer clothes as she returned to the UK from a holiday to the Caribbean has been jailed for six-and-a-half years.

Jade Cherise Sarwar, 25, was stopped by Border Force offices at St Pancras station as she arrived in London on the Eurostar, recovering class A drugs worth £38,000 from her luggage.

She tried to blame county lines drug dealer Elijah Thompson, 28, for the find, saying he had paid for the week-long trip to the Caribbean island of Martinique and had asked her to bring back the suitcase of designer clothes.

However phone evidence showed she had been in regular contact with Thompson during the holiday, while he and an accomplice Raymond Yates, 36, were waiting nearby in St Pancras when Sarwar was arrested on January 13. She had flown back to Paris before taking the Eurostar into London.

National Crime Agency investigators also uncovered a string of Snapchat pictures posted by Sarwar – a dancer who had appeared in a string of grime music videos - as she enjoyed her break to the Caribbean.

And just three months earlier, in October 2018, Sarwar had been given a 12-month prison sentence suspended for 18 months after being caught in another drug trafficking operation.

At Isleworth crown court yesterday, Sarwar, from Newton Abbot in Devon, was jailed for six years for the Caribbean smuggling operation and an extra six months after breaching the suspended sentence handed out in October last year.

Yates, from Croydon, and Thompson, of New Addington, were both sentenced to nine-and-a-half years in prison, and all three were given three-year travel bans when they are released from prison.

Christopher Hill, Senior NCA investigator, said Thompson – nicknamed ‘Flips’ for his short temper – and Yates met in prison, and they regularly travelled from London to the south west of England to sell drugs.

“Our investigation linked the trio together throughout the course of the conspiracy by phone and text messages presenting a very strong case to the jury”, he said.

Yates admitted the charge of conspiracy to import class A drugs, while Thompson and Sarwar both denied the allegation and were convicted after a trial.