The two British school girls arrested in July for trying to smuggle more than 6kg of Cocaine into Britain from Ghana could face up to 5 years each in jail if found guilty at the trial which has been on-going since their arrest.

Yasemin Vatansever and Yetunde Diya, both 16 and from London, were discovered carrying laptop bags with the drugs hidden in the lining.

The girls claim that they did not know what was in the bags and that they had been duped by international smugglers from El Bordo, Colombia, a town well known for being controlled by the FARQ, the most powerful of Colombian Guerilla melitia.

However the girls who are both students at a college in Islington face serious consequences due to the fact that they planned their whole trip and had told their parents that they were on a school trip to Paris when in fact they had flown more than 3,000 miles away across Africa to Ghana.

There they had what became an all-expenses-paid holiday during which they partied in Accra, relaxed by their hotel pool and visited the country's Atlantic Ocean beaches.

Officers involved in joint British-Ghanaian anti-drugs drive called Operation Westbridge stopped the girls as they returned to Kotoka International Airport in the capital.

As they prepared to board a British Airways flight back to England, a prudent officer noticed the girls acting suspiciously. The girls said that they were handed the laptop bags, which they were told would be collected by a man on arrival at Heathrow.

The girls were arrested and remanded in custody at Kotoka Police headquarters and have been held in a secure unit ever since.

In a similar incident, two other young Londoners were arrested at Accra's airport earlier this month and found to have 3.5 kilos of cocaine hidden in the bags or clothes, or in pellets in their stomachs that they had swallowed.

There has been an increase in cocaine smuggling due to the high demand on London’s streets and authorities fear that South American smugglers are taking advantage of vulnerable British teenagers to bring drugs into Europe through different channels.

West Africa is proving a popular route as it is understood to be a weak link in the chain. Policing and detection in many parts of Africa is very poor and Police fear that many more gullible ‘mule’ victims will be caught.

About 300 tons of cocaine, with a street value of £30 billion, is now trafficked through West Africa to Europe every year, according to Interpol estimates.

consignments are loaded on to ships in South America where they are taken to the mid-Atlantic, they are then transferred to African-registered vessels.

The larger consignments remain largely undetected as they piggy-back their way towards destinations such as Guinea Bissau, Mauritania, Senegal, Sierra Leone or Ghana, small fishing boats meet the deliveries to divide up the illegal shipments for further transportation towards the UK.

They convey the drugs to the shore, where consignments are loaded on to waiting cars. They are then driven to capital cities, where wealthy Colombian dealers have bought beachside villas, especially in Guinea Bissau.

Drugs are also stored in anonymous warehouses often being set up as fake tuna canning plants. Then large loads are put on trucks and driven thousands of miles through a myriad of roads north to Morocco.

There, middlemen who know Europe’s weak points smuggle the drugs across the Mediterranean, usually on private yachts and via light aircraft where they eventually meet the shores of Britain.

Last year alone, more than 200 tons of Cocaine was discovered in separate Police finds at many remote coastal inlets and bays as well as via small light-commercial airports like Southampton and Southend.

The two girls will be in court next month to face more evidence before a judge and jury and their lawyers will be able to present their defence.