A man caught with 13kg (28lb) of cocaine and a gun has been sentenced to 11 years in prison.

Albanian Irakli Rustemi, 33, was an illegal immigrant and had absconded from the Immigration Service, police discovered.

In a chalet in the garden of a house on Penton Drive in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, officers found a 9mm pistol and cocaine worth £700,000.

Rustemi pleaded guilty to possession of a class A drug with intent to supply, possession of a firearm and possession of ammunition, and was jailed at St Albans Crown Court on Wednesday.

Officers from the Organized Crime Partnership (OCP), a specialist unit made up of officers from the Metropolitan Police and the National Crime Agency, had ordered Cambridgeshire Police to stop a car on the A10 in Buntingford in October. past.

They were working on intelligence that suggested the occupants had access to a firearm.

When Rustemi was arrested, officers found a key in the car that opened an apartment in the garden of a house in Cheshunt, where OCP officers discovered a Makarov 9mm automatic pistol and six rounds of ammunition in a magazine that had been wrapped in a towel and placed in a closet.

They also found cocaine with an estimated street value of £700,000.

The cocaine was mostly separated into 1kg blocks, but was also found in bags of smaller quantities.

Following his sentencing, OCP’s Andrew Tickner said: “(Our) primary mission is to protect the public from dangerous criminals like Irakli Rustemi, whose criminal group has now been dismantled.”