A JUDGE today urged an Albanian man arrested at a large Bradford cannabis farm to spread the word in his homeland that illegal immigrants would run up huge debts to get here and end up in prison.

Jailing Markelian Baku for ten months, Judge Jonathan Rose told him: “When you get back to Albania, tell everybody who will listen to you that there is no point in doing what you have done.

“You will not make money, you will go to prison, you will return to Albania.”

Baku, 23, of no fixed address, was caught tending a 150-plant cannabis farm in Spring Place, Great Horton, on January 3.

Prosecutor Eddison Flint told Bradford Crown Court the police were called out to an incident of domestic violence but nothing like that was happening at the address.

They spotted Baku walking away from the back of the property and he was pursued and found hiding in a garden with a set of keys to the house.

When the police searched the property they found a commercial cannabis farm with 81 large plants in four of the rooms and a nursery of smaller plants providing a follow-on crop.

The electricity meter had been bypassed and there were high-powered lights, electric fans and transformers.

Baku made no comment to the police and refused to provide the PIN codes to phones seized, Mr Flint said.

Soheil Khan said in mitigation that Baku’s case was sadly like that of many others who had made it to the United Kingdom under the cloud of a large debt. He was seeking a better life but as an illegal immigrant he had no way of earning a proper living.

He did not set up the cannabis farm or expect to have any great profit from the enterprise.

Judge Rose said that on his release from prison Baku would be returned to Albania.

If he did anything good following his conviction, he would tell people in his homeland that he spent £23,000 to get to the UK and so put himself into huge debt.

“There was no hope that you, as an illegal immigrant, would be able to get a good job and pay off that debt and so you would have to turn to crime and because of that, it was inevitable that you would be arrested and sent to prison and then back to Albania,” Judge Rose said.