DC Jason Savident in the field off King’s Mills where the 10kg of cannabis were discovered. (Picture by Peter Frankland, 0871774)

A CIGARETTE butt discarded two years earlier linked a woman to a major drug importation.

Although Hayley Briggs was captured on CCTV as she and her then partner went to recover nearly 10kg of cannabis resin from a field, she could not be identified from it.

A DNA test on a cigarette she was seen to throw away failed to match any on the UK National Database. But when she had to provide a DNA sample after she was charged with drink-driving two years later, the link was established.

The Royal Court jailed Briggs, 30, for two and a half years after she admitted a charge of knowingly being concerned in a cannabis importation.

Prosecutor Advocate Chris Dunford told the court that the drugs had an estimated street value in Guernsey of between £64,000 and £108,000 at 2006 prices, when the offence was committed.

The court heard that, on a July afternoon that year, a farm worker was clearing weeds from the edge of a Castel field when she noticed an object in the hedge. It was a toolbox containing 40 clingfilm-wrapped packages of a brown resinous substance covered in a towel.

The woman was suspicious and she told her employer, who called the police.

The drugs were removed and replaced with telephone directories to a similar weight. The toolbox was put back in the hedge and a covert CCTV camera was mounted in the field.

On a daily check some two weeks later, it was found that the toolbox had gone. CCTV footage showed two people entering the field the night before and, guided by light from a torch, rummaging in a hedge with a stick.

The woman, later identified as Briggs, was seen to throw a cigarette down and step on it. She then crawled into the hedge on her hands and knees and pulled out the toolbox.

She would later say that when the man she was with, her former partner, realised the drugs had been replaced, he told her to ‘get out of the field quick’.