Police have charged 11 people in connection with attempting to smuggle 22 suitcases packed with cannabis from Thailand to Birmingham worth a combined total of nearly £14m.

More than half a ton of the class B drug, described by the National Crime Agency (NCA) as an “enormous amount”, was seized at Birmingham airport in August 2024. The 11 people charged, aged from 21 to 35, all travelled to the UK from Thailand via Paris Charles de Gaulle airport.

Nine of them appeared at Birmingham magistrates court on Friday, where they were bailed until their next appearance at Birmingham crown court on 28 November 2025.

Six men suspected of organising the attempted importation, five of whom were arrested at addresses in Marsh Farm, Luton, and Finchley in north London on 23 October 2024, remain under investigation.

NCA branch commander Kevin Broadhead said: “This was an enormous amount of cannabis to be seized from air passengers and would have been extremely profitable for organised crime gangs had it remain undetected.

“The charges brought against these individuals are an important moment in our investigation, which remains ongoing.

“Anyone who is asked to smuggle drugs into the UK should think very carefully about the potential consequences if caught.

“The chances of getting caught are high, and it just isn’t worth that risk.”

Last year, the NCA said the amount of cannabis seized from smugglers carrying the drug in suitcases to UK airports has tripled in less than a year, with about 15 tonnes of the drug being uncovered at airports by August 2024, compared with 5 tonnes throughout the whole of 2023, and 2 tonnes in 2022.

Thailand, Canada and the parts of the US where cannabis is decriminalised and can be legally grown are hotspots for trafficking to the UK. Gangs can make significant profits by selling cannabis trafficked from these countries because they are perceived as being high-quality.

There have been a number of high-profile cannabis trafficking cases recently. Former Arsenal footballer Jay Emmanuel Thomas was sentenced to four years in prison in June after he admitted orchestrating a plot to recruit two women to travel to Thailand and smuggle cannabis back to the UK. Two women, including Thomas’s girlfriend, were caught at Stansted airport with four suitcases each containing 15kg (33lbs) of cannabis.

In May, Bella Culley, a 19-year-old student nurse from Billingham, was arrested at Tbilisi airport after being stopped with, it is alleged, 14kg (31lbs) of cannabis worth £200,000 in a travel bag. She had been travelling in south-east Asia but was reported missing in Pattaya, Thailand until her arrest in Georgia.

Culley had previously been told she could face up to 20 years in jail or life imprisonment if convicted but her family have paid £138,000 in a plea bargain deal that could result in her being handed a two-year jail sentence.