Agim Cjapi turned 33 on Friday 16 October 2026, the day Recorder Anna Vigars KC sentenced him at Carlisle Crown Court.[1] She jailed him for 20 months for producing cannabis and told him she was sorry the hearing fell on his birthday.[1] He is likely to serve about a third of that before release on licence, and she understood deportation would be arranged early.[1]
Police entered a building on Market Street in Kirkby Stephen on 1 July 2026 and found him there.[1] Prosecutor Tim Evans said they seized 293 cannabis plants, upstairs and downstairs, at different stages including seedlings, grown with lights, soil and water.[1] Used soil showed this was not the first crop.[1] If the plants had matured and been sold, he put the street yield at £439,000.[1]
Cjapi, whose address was given as Market Street, admitted the charge.[1] He told police he had been in Britain about a year, at the Kirkby Stephen address for several months, and that his pay was to clear a debt for the journey.[1] He said he sent £200 a month to Albania for his elderly father.[1] He had been in custody since early July and wanted to go home.[1]
His counsel, Andrew Gurney, said he had been smuggled in, threatened if he refused work on building sites and at car washes, and then taken to Market Square, where supervisors kept his passport and he lived in squalor tending the plants.[1] He was not paid in any significant way and did not control the people above him.[1]
