Neighbours who reported what appeared to be a burglary helped police to uncover a cannabis factory in Portslade.
There are suspicions that a rival drugs gang had tried to take over or saborage the operation in Vale Road.
Sussex Police said: “Do you have any information to report in connection with a cannabis factory found in Portslade?
“Police were called to a disturbance at an address in Vale Road, Portslade, on Friday 8 August at around 4am.
“On attendance, officers entered the property and discovered cannabis plants being grown inside.
“A search was undertaken. However, no one was located at the address.
“The plants have since been seized and an investigation launched.
“We are appealing for witnesses, or anyone with information to come forward to assist our onwards inquiries.
“You can do this by reporting online or by calling 101, quoting reference 140 of 08/08.”
It would be interesting to hear how many cannabis farms are discovered by police in Brighton and Hove – because they are not always reported on. However this latest story is the second police raid made public this week.
As it happens, I live in an old house in one of Hove’s leafy seafront avenues, and our old building is divided into five flats. I have the one bed apartment at the front, on the first floor, and with a narrow balcony. Back in June, I was watering my three flower pots when I saw four police vans pull up outside. Eight police officers surrounded the building, including three officers going over our side wall into the back garden.
I went downstairs to ask if could help, and was asked if I knew who lived in the rear garden flat, on the ground floor. A middle aged man had rented that flat for over a year, and he had a little dog, but for the past nine months a young lad had also lived there, maybe 18 or so, who I had guessed was his son.
The older guy had actually not been around for a couple of months, but recently I’d been on nodding terms with the younger lad, mostly when he went out to take the dog for a walk. We didn’t speak, because I’d gathered that english was/is not his first language.
I explained these details to the police, assuming they had come to the wrong place, or maybe for some immigration issue. The lad was at home, because his bike was there.
Half an hour later, I came downstairs again, to load my van to go to work, and I saw they had the young guy in handcuffs at the side of the building.
The lad looked sheepish as he was taken away, but then electricians arrived, and they wanted access to our communal hallway, where the meters are.
It was the electricians who explained to me that the back flat had boarded up windows and that inside there was a cannabis farm with a flourishing crop spread over three rooms. The kitchen had been ripped out to make more growing space. The electricity had been bypassed around the meter – to get free energy to power the grow lamps.
And the rest of us in the building had no idea this had been going on, maybe for a year and a half or more! When the dope plants grow, there is no smell, and I later heard that the crop was ventilated with holes cut in the floor, and via tunnels burrowed under our building!
The police were at our house for hours, following procedure, and the forensics went in first, to get any fingerprints and to take photos. Then the police officers went in to bag up the crop. And then they smashed up the growing equipment – apparently because they no longer have space to store it all.
I told the officer in charge that the teenage boy they had arrested had only been there a short while – and therefore was probably not the one who had set up this operation – and the officer explained that young people are often trafficked into the UK to run these small cannabis farms. As eastern Europeans, they get offered cheap accommodation in trendy Brighton and Hove, and all they have to do is to water the pot plants.
The dramatic event was over as quickly as it began, and the garden flat in our building has not been visited since. We have an absentee freeholder at our house, and we can only assume that some background racketeering is going on, because somebody connected to our building must have known about this.