Drug mule hid heroin in spare wheel

A DRUG courier has been jailed for 45 months after he was caught with heroin worth £900,000 hidden in a spare wheel as he drove back from a court appearance.

Steven Carse was stopped by police driving a Volkswagen Golf car that officers had received intelligence on. Nine kilos of the Class A drug were found packaged inside the wheel.

A judge told Carse at the High Court in Edinburgh yesterday: “The amount involved is very large, having a potential street value of many hundreds of thousands of pounds.”

Lord Tyre highlighted “the enormous misery” that the use of drugs causes across Scotland and told Carse, 27, that he would have faced a five-year prison sentence, but for his guilty plea.

The court heard that the unemployed carpet fitter borrowed £3000 from drug traffickers after taking on a holiday booking to Tenerife that he could not afford.

Carse, of Gibraltar Road, Dalkeith, in Midlothian, was stopped on the A6904 near Penicuik, following an appearance at Blackpool magistrates court for a driving offence.