A pair of Albanian men who were smuggled across the Channel found themselves locked in a cannabis factory – tending plants worth almost half a million pounds.

Klajdi Vraja and Ajet Xhaja, both 21, were caught on October 7 when police raided the warehouse on Lupton Road, Thame, around 100 metres from the police station.

The men were found in an upstairs bedroom at the factory, which was near a children’s ‘play centre’. The 800 cannabis plants were growing in a downstairs room and had been estimated to have a street value, once harvested, of £470,000.

The drugs factory, which was powered by illegally-abstracted electricity, boasted a kitchen and a network of CCTV cameras.

Mitigating for Xhaja, Peter du Feu said his client had been trafficked from his home in rural Albania and was driven through Belgium and France in the back of a lorry.

“Nobody told him what England held for him. It wasn’t his choice. The gangsters don’t get them at the Channel, they get them in Albania often. They need workers for their cannabis factories in this country and they recruit them in Albania from, as your honour’s read in this case, rural Albania,” the barrister said.

“Nobody told him it would incur a debt of many thousands of pounds for which he’d have to work; but that is what happened.”

The young men like his client who were trafficked and set up in cannabis factories in England often did not ‘come here by choice’. “That is the position with him,” Mr du Feu said of Xhaja.

Oxford Mail:

Eiran Reilly, for co-defendant Vraja, said the young man had incurred a £20,000 debt coming to the UK in search of a better life. He said the two farmers had ‘never left’ the factory in Thame over the month they were there; they were locked in and food was delivered to them.

Vraja and Xhaja, both of no fixed address, pleaded guilty at an earlier hearing to producing a class B drug. Neither had previous convictions.

The men hung their heads as they were each jailed for a year at Oxford Crown Court on Thursday.

Judge Michael Gledhill KC said: “You are two young Albanian men who came to this country for what you thought was going to be a good life.

“That is the phrase you both used to the probation officer who prepared your pre-sentence reports.

“No doubt you were influenced by lots of people back home in Albania and had very little understanding of the reality of what would happen to you if the smugglers got you across the Channel.

“You placed yourselves in the hands of the smugglers. You’re both intelligent men. You knew what you were doing, though you perhaps didn’t realise the consequences.

“In order to repay the debt you owed to these gangsters you had no hesitation, probably because you hadn’t very much choice, in agreeing to work in this cannabis factory in Thame.”

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This story was written by Tom Seaward. He joined the team in 2021 as Oxfordshire's court and crime reporter.  

To get in touch with him email: Tom.Seaward@newsquest.co.uk

Follow him on Twitter: @t_seaward