Suitcases containing 271kg of cocaine worth over £22m were dropped from a jet on to an airport runway, the trial of a Sussex man heard today.

A jury at Basildon Crown Court heard that the drugs were in six suitcases flown from Jamaica in a plane which landed at Southend airport, Essex, last October.

Four men deny smuggling the cocaine into Britain.

They are: Martin Lake, 60, of Bracken Lane, Storrington; Christopher Barrett-Jolley, 54, of Wellington, Somerset; his brother-in-law Peter Carine, 50, of Hensall, North Yorkshire; and Duncan Adamson, 41, of Great Warford, Cheshire.

David Green QC, prosecuting, said the drugs were in an otherwise empty Boeing 707 freight plane owned by a Nigerian prince which landed at the airport on October 16.

On board the plane were Barrett-Jolley and Carine, who were both pilots, and Lake, a flight engineer.

Mr Green said: "As the plane taxied along the remotest part of the runway, the six suitcases were ejected from the hatch in the belly of the aeroplane on to the Tarmac."

Mr Green said Customs officers had been tipped off about the drop and were waiting to arrest those involved.

He said: "The act of ejecting the drugs from the plane must have been done in order to enable others unknown on the ground to retrieve the drugs from the runway and spirit them away.

"It seems very likely that whoever was to have collected the suitcases from the end of the runway had been put off by the activity in and around the airport that evening."

It is alleged that Adamson, a company director of Bridgewater Finance in Manchester, financed the alleged operation.

Mr Green said Barrett-Jolley, Carine and others organised the alleged importation.

Also on board the plane was Nikolai Luzaic, a British/Yugoslav national who had tipped off HM Customs and Excise about the operation from Jamaica.

Mr Green said without his information the alleged importation might well have not been detected.

The trial continues.