South London Press deputy editor Paul Dietrich has launched a campaign to free his own father-in-law from a 22- year jail sentence for drug smuggling.
The deputy editor of the Streathambased twice-weekly Trinity Mirror title is convinced Geoff Hyde has been the victim of a "horrendous miscarriage of justice".
Hyde, a former Surrey haulage boss, was sent to prison at Inner London Crown Court last month for conspiring to supply £9.5m worth of cocaine. The father of three was found guilty by a jury after a four-week trial at which he denied the offence. His two co-defendants, John Paul Town and Francisco Ibanez-Cantero, were also found guilty and jailed for a total of 40 years.
The Crown Court was told that all three men were arrested in February when Metropolitan Police officers raided a haulage yard in Chertsey after seeing 77kg of drugs being unloaded from an articulated lorry into a white van.
The cocaine was concealed inside a metal structure underneath the truck, carrying salad produce from Spain.
After the sentencing, Dietrich told his father-in-law's local paper, the Leatherhead Advertiser: "The criminal justice system has failed before and it has failed now. Geoff is an innocent man."
He told the paper the case against Hyde was full of flaws and that Hyde thought he was letting someone into the yard to fix the brakes on their lorry.
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