A FORMER policeman who attempted to board a flight at Belfast International Airport with over €180,000 in his hand luggage has been jailed for 10 months.
Mark Adams, of Castleheath in Malahide, Dublin, was stopped by members of the UK Border Force in May 2018 as he was boarding a flight to Alicante in Spain.
The 42-year-old former Dublin Airport policeman had claimed he was attending a wedding in Spain, but the UK's National Crime Agency (NCA) found Adams had booked a return flight to Belfast set to take off just one hour and 20 minutes after his arrival in Alicante.
The cash in his luggage was contained in folders "disguised to look like they contained legally privileged documentation", the NCA said.
An investigation found Adams had taken almost 500 flights into and out of the UK during the previous five years, "often returning shortly after landing at his destination".
Following his arrest Adams was bailed, and when he failed to return to the north a European Arrest Warrant was issued.
It was discovered Adams had been taken into custody in the Republic on separate money laundering charges.
Among other offences, he was accused of attempting to smuggle €500,000 out of Dublin Airport in 2015.
He was sentenced to five years in prison in the Republic, and was temporarily transported over the border to face charges relating to the Belfast International Airport cash - which was deemed criminal property.
Adams admitted attempting to remove criminal property and entering an arrangement to acquire criminal property, and was sentenced yesterday at Antrim Crown Court to 10 months in jail.
In a statement following the sentencing, the NCA's Belfast branch commander David Cunningham described Adams as a "serial money launderer on both sides of the Irish border", who as a former police officer "would have been well aware that what he was doing was wrong".
Mr Cunningham said of Adams: "Working with our Irish colleagues we were able to spot a pattern of him regularly travelling out of airports in both the Republic and UK, and returning home shortly afterwards.
"Each time he is likely to have taken tens or even hundreds of thousands of Euros, and may have been responsible for laundering many millions of criminal money in total."