Youth ‘pressured into hiding sawn-off shotgun and drugs’

Leeds Crown Court heard yesterday officers executed a search warrant at the address of Darren Bentley in April and discovered the .410 shotgun wrapped in cloth hidden in the bathroom.

The barrel and stock had both been shortened making it an illegal length.

Bentley told officers at the time: “I use it to go shooting with my mate’s grandfather” but Philip Tully, representing him, told the court he now accepted he had been pressured into letting a drug dealer use his home for storage of the weapon and drugs.

“He says the weapon had only been brought to his home a few days earlier,”

Nicholas Barker, prosecuting, said during the search at the house in Foundry Mill Gardens, Seacroft, Leeds, officers also found a block of compressed powder in a cupboard which turned out to be cocaine and outside the property in a storage area there were seven large bags of cannabis worth around £1,600.

Mr Tully told the court Bentley was not a commercial supplier but at the time was a young man with a long-standing addiction to drugs.

He had built up drug debts and after receiving severe threats to himself and his family he had agreed to allow storage at his property.

“The author of the pre-sentence report on him feels he was put upon by far more sophisticated criminals than he is.”

Bentley, 19, admitted possessing cocaine and cannabis with intent to supply and possession of the shotgun.

Sentencing him to a total of six years in a young offender institution Judge Geoffrey Marson QC said: “Drugs and shotguns are a lethal combination.

“A shotgun of this type, sawn off in the way it had been, can only have one purpose, and that is to commit crime, either to use it to threaten, to kill or injure somebody.

He said the prosecution accepted the dealer had used Bentley “but courts have to send out a message that those who allow themselves to be used in this way and put themselves in a situation where they store a shotgun and live ammunition and story drugs for another must expect custody.”