SEVEN hundred cannabis plants worth £300,000 on the street were seized by police in a dramatic, daylight raid near Newbury town centre on Tuesday morning.
Our exclusive pictures show the moment 14 local officers smashed down the door of a semi-detached house on the main A4 London Road at 10am to reveal a sophisticated drugs factory.
Cowering inside a tiny cubby hole at the rear of the rented property was a teenaged Vietnamese national who was led away in handcuffs and bundled into a police van.
Once inside the house, opposite Faraday Road, officers fanned out into each room of the three-storey building.
What they found exceeded all expectations.
Every square foot of floor space, apart from a coffin-sized sleeping area, had been given over to the high-tec cultivation of the plants.
Silver foil to reflect light and heat hung from every surface, a tangled ‘spaghetti junction’ of leads led from a panel of junction boxes to rows of overhead lights and a purple nutrient solution filled the bath ready to be pumped into row upon orderly row of plant pots.
Downstairs the next generation of seedlings was already thriving.
The pungent smell of powerful ‘skunk’ cannabis had been sucked into huge ventilation shafts and pumped into the loft space to dissipate, while electrical power for the operation was illegally drained by bypassing the national grid.
A jubilant Sergeant Andy Bone, who led the operation, said minutes afterwards: “We have found a large cannabis factory right on our doorstep and disrupted a major drug-producing operation. These plants were flowering and ripe, ready for harvest.
“It’s a good result.”
Neighbour Peter Lomax expressed astonishment at the scale of the illegal operation being carried out next door.
He said: “We never saw anyone coming or going. The place had seemed deserted recently.”
Police revealed substantial damage had been done to the interior of the property to accommodate the factory and said the owners were innocent of any wrongdoing.
Jocelyn Eaton told the Newbury Weekly News that her parents, John and Yvonne Eaton, had rented out the property “some time last year.”
She added: “The first we knew anything was wrong was when we heard the place had been raided.”
Newbury Neighbourhood Police team’s Inspector Emily Roberts said: “The operation was conducted with officers from the Newbury, Hungerford and Thatcham neighbourhood teams, including two PCSOs (Police Community Support Officers) and it involved careful planning.
“We hope to send out a clear message to such criminals not to target this region.”