BOGUS British Telecom workers led the police to discover a huge Bradford cannabis factory capable of yielding almost 60 kilos of the drug.

The 13-room grow at a house in Wilmer Road, Heaton, was so extensive that the electricity was bypassed by digging up the road because the 279 transformers would have blown the meter.

Bradford Crown Court heard that months before the crop was found, men with southern accents had been seen digging up the road at around 8.30pm.

Local residents were suspicious because the supposed BT workers were in ordinary clothes and there was no logo on their van.

On January 28 this year, a community police officer on duty in the area was alerted to the cannabis farm by a householder who mentioned the dodgy BT team.

Two days later, the police broke into the large detached gated property.

Their suspicions were immediately aroused by the covered windows, wooden structures in view to hide the plants from the outside world and condensation on the windows.

They forced entry and discovered 1,056 cannabis plants, 693 of them fully mature and a smaller follow-on crop.

In all, the farm was capable of producing 58 kilos of skunk cannabis and another two kilos of the drug had been bagged up ready to sell on.

Three Albanian men who had been trafficked into the United Kingdom were arrested at the house and each was locked up for 12 months yesterday.

Mariglen Luta, 23, Ramadan Idrizi, 22, and 20-year-old Ronaldo Caka, all of no fixed address, pleaded guilty to production of cannabis.

The court heard that all three had the keys to the house and smartphones. There was a plentiful supply of food and a brand new PlayStation 5 console at the address.

Christopher Styles, mitigating for Luta and Idrizi, said they had been pressured and exploited, taking all of the risks and getting none of the profits from the enterprise.

Caka was just 20 years old, the court heard, and also used by those higher up the chain.

All the men had been held in custody since the day of their arrest.

The Recorder of Bradford, Judge Richard Mansell QC, said it was a very substantial cannabis grow but none of the men had set it up. Each had been illegally brought into the country and was working to pay off a debt to the traffickers.

Judge Mansell said the sophisticated electricity bypass was necessary to the criminals who established the farm because of the scale of the operation.

“Had they tampered with the meter, it would probably have blown the entire system,” he said.

He told the men it would be up to the Home Office if they were deported back to Albania.