An Edgware man has been sentenced to nine years in prison for his involvement in a plot to smuggle pure cocaine with a street value of £3.2 million into Britain.

Colombian Migel Velasquez, 30, of Goldbeaters Grove, along with three other Colombians, admitted conspiracy to supply cocaine on or before March 29 last year.

The cocaine was brought into the country hidden in a set of wooden doors, in January last year. Special hollows inside the colourfully-decorated doors were lined with sheets of plywood which had been impregnated with liquid cocaine.

Inside the doors was 17.3kg pure cocaine, Inner London Crown Court heard. The doors were shipped into Britain from Panama by Paul Sneath, 24, a wealthy former public schoolboy from Surrey who organised the plot. He was found guilty of the same conspiracy to supply charge and jailed for 18 years.

Sneath took the doors to a lock-up in Dalston, east London, where the Colombians were brought in to extract the drug.

At a hardware shop, undercover police watched Velasquez and his co-conspirators buy a cheese grater, a strainer and forensic suits and trailed them to a makeshift processing plant in Shacklewell Lane.

The gang set to work on the bright green doors which had been decorated with parrots, cutting off the top and bottom and sliding out the doctored panels.

The smugglers had to grind the wood with a cheese grater, before mixing the shavings with industrial solvent to separate the cocaine.

It was left to dry and would then have been chopped up into powder, but police from Scotland Yard's Specialist Crime Directorate (SCD) intervened before this could happen.

Two of the men were arrested while still wearing their protective suits and rubber gloves. Detectives then traced the plot back to Sneath.

Velasquez has a British passport and is not liable for deportation.

Jude Lindsay Burn described the complex way the group had smuggled the drug into the country as unique'. "The Crown prosecution rightly describe that method as having been virtually undetectable," he said.

Acting Detective Chief Inspector Grant Johnson, from the SCD, said: "The operation carried out by my officers shows that no matter what lengths they go to we will identify them and catch them."

Johhny Mejia, 26, and Diego Tovar, 41, both of Islington, and Luis Lopez, 27, of West Kensington, were sentenced to 12, nine and ten years respectively.