TWO men have been jailed for a total of 28 years for importing firearms.

Nicholas Barbary, 29, and 30-year-old Mark Maynard were busted by an operation carried out by Sussex Police earlier this year.

The pair were arrested by officers from the Sussex Police Serious Organised Crime Unit when their hire van was stopped by armed officers on the M23 southbound in Crawley at 8.40pm on January 17.

They were found in possession of two machine guns, a self-loading pistol and ammunition. All the weapons were fully-loaded.

The weapons were found wrapped in black plastic tape, attached by magnets underneath the van. The package contained 157 rounds of ammunition.

Barbary, unemployed and from Walesbeech, Crawley, was given 12 years after pleading guilty to importing and possessing the weapons with intent to endanger life.

Self-employed Maynard, of New England Road in Haywards Heath, was given 16 years and two months.

Detective Sergeant Paul Graham, of Sussex Police, said: "These arrests followed intelligence and our investigation showed that the pair were responsible for these weapons coming into the UK and their collection once here.

"Although we have not yet established exactly what if anything specific was planned or where the weapons were to be moved to, they were clearly intended for criminal use in or around Sussex.

"On January 17 we followed Maynard and Barbary from Crawley to a coach park in Coventry, where they retrieved a package attached by magnets to the underside of a coach that had returned the previous day from a routine tourist trip to Belgium and attached it to the underside of their van.

"We followed and stopped them when they came back to Sussex.

"The package had been attached to the coach without the knowledge of the coach operators or the passengers.

"Clearly these weapons posed a real threat to people in Sussex and elsewhere, whether engaged in crime or law-abiding. But we were able, working with law enforcement partners in the UK and abroad, to prevent them reaching the streets and causing injury or death."

Tom Guest, of the CPS, said: “Maynard and Barbary used a tourist coach excursion to smuggle deadly weapons into the country. Both engaged in significant planning to carry out this serious criminality.

"The CPS worked closely with Sussex Police to build a strong case against the men, leaving them with no choice but to plead guilty.”

There was no evidence of terrorism links.