Matthew Horne

Speaking in April last year, Britain's ambassador to Albania, Duncan Norman, said "60 to 70 per cent" of 726 Albanian inmates at that time in Britain were from these three northern counties.

Deeply impoverished, the region has become a rich recruitment ground for the Albanian crime gangs that now dominate the cocaine market in Britain.

Albanian crime gangs are assuming a leading role in the UK's cocaine trade, the London Times reported on Thursday, citing new data from the police's National Crime Agency - which reported on this phenomenon last year.

A table listing the 4,600 known crime gangs on the police's radar showed Albanians "overtaking" Romanians for the first time in 2017.

Criminal Albanian gangs ready to resort to “serious violence” have “considerable control” over the drug trafficking market in the UK, a National Crime Agency (NCA) report has revealed.

The gangs, which use London as their primary hub but are established across the whole of the UK, have been found to have a particular influence on the cocaine market.

Albanian organized crime groups are taking an increasingly high profile role in the cocaine trade in the UK, while Romanian gangs are increasingly prevalent in "modern slavery" in the UK, according to a new report from the UK's National Crime Agency, NCA, which blames corruption at airports and ports for the apparent ease of access of the drugs to the UK.