An elderly couple who like to keep the heating on at home were left ‘shaking in fear’ when police burst into their home searching for a cannabis farm – after a thermal camera on a helicopter wrongly identified it as a drugs den.
Pensioners Barry and Mavis Lovelock were finishing their breakfast when the ‘terrifying’ raid took place.
Nine officers stormed in because a helicopter camera had mistakenly identified their toasty terrace home as a potential cannabis grow.
But after charging upstairs looking for cannabis plants and the strong lamps used to grow them, the sheepish officers came back down empty-handed after quickly concluding their tip-off had been ‘not fully accurate’.
The heat signature on the couple’s roof had instead been caused by their two gas fires, which they keep on around-the-clock in the colder months.
Leicestershire Police has now apologised. They said another raid on a separate property in the street in Newfoundpool, Leicester, had found a large cannabis farm, with 79 plants being seized.
Mrs Lovelock said the ‘awful’ incident, which took place on March 15 at the property the couple had lived in since 1978, had left her in tears.
She said: ‘They told us the camera on the helicopter had noticed our roof glowing white but that was just because we have the heating on all of the time.
‘People of our age feel the cold so we need the heating on.
‘We have two new gas fires downstairs and the gas engineer told us they will warm the whole house and they do. We keep the doors open and the heat circulates. We have electric wall heaters too, but we only need to put the electric heater on in the back bedroom.’
She said the couple had just finished their breakfast when she noticed a group of police officers outside as her husband, a retired water board worker, went to make another cup of tea.
Mrs Lovelock said that police then ‘hit the door’, prompting Mr Lovelock to shout: ‘Hang on mate’, before somebody shouted ‘Stand clear’ from the street outside.
She added: ‘They just rammed the door in. It was awful. They knocked the gate at the back in as well.
‘It was terrifying and I said to them, ‘What the devil do you think you’re doing? There’s two pensioners here.’
The couple, who celebrated their Golden Wedding anniversary last year, were shown a warrant with their house number on it.
Mrs Lovelock, a former hospital worker, added: ‘They got in and two of them ran upstairs, but they only went to the top of the stairs and ran back down.
‘I think there were about nine of them altogether, maybe more.
Hellbound and Down 