A man has been jailed for smuggling £550,000 of pure heroin hidden inside chessboards.

The drug was hidden in the fabric of ten games boards and dissolved so it could only be extracted by a special process.

The parcel, which also included dried fruit, was sent from Pakistan abd was intercepted in by the UK Border Force, when a small part of one of the board games was cut.

It was addressed to a house in Gainsborough Avenue, Oldham, in Manchester, to a 'Mr S Ahmed'. The name was fictitious but the address was real.

A dummy package was prepared after the boards were removed and a National Crime Agency officer posed as a delivery man to drop it off at the address.

Syed Naveed Shabir: cleared of murder but jailed for smuggling heroin in chessboards

When he arrived he got no reply at the house so left a 'failure to deliver' card and a number to call.

The number had been set up by the NCA to monitor the calls of anyone requesting delivery of the package.

A call was received claiming the parcel and the undercover officer travelled to the address again.

Manchester Crown Court was told it was Shabir's telephone number that was used to call the 'Parcelforce' number. His fingerprints were found on the delivery note.

The parcel was actually received by another man, Khazar Hussain, who signed the delivery sheet 'Sataroz Ahmed' after approaching the 'Parcelforce driver' when he pulled up in his van and asking if he had anything for 'Mr S Ahmed'.

Hussain was arrested in a nearby street but later accused Shabir of setting him up and was cleared of all charges at the trial.

Pete Avery, from the NCA's Border Policing Command, said: "This was a sophisticated concealment and demonstrates the lengths criminals go to in an effort to avoid detection.

I have no doubt Shabir would have gone on to import large quantities of pure heroin, but joint work with the Border Force means he is now behind bars where he belongs."

Drug runner cleared of murder

Back in 2011, Shabir was cleared of the murder of 21-year-old shopworker Junaid Khan when a jury found him not guilty.

Khan was shot on July 9, 2009, following a long-running personal feud with Milad Finn, Liaquat Khan, and Shabir, who all denied murder.

The court was told that the victim wept as he told a pal he thought he was going to be killed.

Khan was gunned down at midnight as he walked to a car parked in a doctor's surgery in Chadderton, Oldham.

He died in a hail of bullets from a Mac-10 machine gun. At a trial, all three men were all cleared of his murder by a unanimous jury after five hours deliberation.

Liaquat's brother, Kashif Khan, had been cleared earlier after a judge directed the jury to return a not guilty verdict.

The defence had claimed the evidence used to implicate them in the murder related not to the killing but a lucrative heroin deal.

Shabir said that phone evidence said to connect him to Mr Finn, the alleged gunman - and a fingerprint on a bundle of cash found at Mr Finn's home - was linked to a drug deal and not the murder.