A man caught with 13kg (28lbs) of cocaine and a gun has been jailed for 11 years.

Albanian Irakli Rustemi, 33, was an illegal immigrant and supported himself from the Immigration Service, police found.

In a garden shed of a house in Penton Drive in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, officers found a 9mm pistol and £700,000 worth of cocaine.

Rustemi pleaded guilty to possession of a Class A drug with intent to supply, possession of a firearm and possession of ammunition and was jailed at St Albans Crown Court on Wednesday.

Officers from the Organized Crime Partnership (OCP) – a specialist unit made up of officers from the Metropolitan Police and the National Crime Agency – instructed Cambridgeshire Police to stop a car on the A10 at Buntingford last October.

They were working on information that suggested the occupants had access to a firearm.

When Rustemi was stopped, officers found a key in the car which opened a flat in the garden of a Cheshunt house, where OCP officers discovered a self-loading 9mm Makarov pistol and six rounds of ammunition in a magazine which had been wrapped in -a towel and placed in a closet.

They also found cocaine with an estimated street value of £700,000.

The cocaine was mostly broken up into 1kg blocks, but smaller bags were also found.

After his sentencing, Andrew Tickner, from the OCP, said: “Our primary mission is to protect the public from dangerous criminals like Irakli Rustemi, whose criminal ring has now been dismantled.”