A DRUG dealer who went on the run for three years has now been jailed – for more than two years.

Mason Kelly had been picked up by police in Swindon hiding in the back of an addict’s car in February 2016 with a drugs line phone. He had up to £400 of heroin and crack cocaine hidden in his bottom.

Swindon Crown Court last week heard the 24-year-old was bailed with a condition to return to Gablecross police station for an interview with drugs squad detectives in June. That shifted twice when Kelly failed to answer his bail.

Wiltshire Police eventually added the his details to the national police system as a wanted man.

Prosecutor Chris Smyth said: “

They made enquiries of the address in London and addresses in Swindon to which he’d previously been linked.” Mobile phone data was analysed and enquires were made with taxi firms.

Mr Smyth said: “As far as the police are concerned they’d made extensive efforts to locate him but had been unable to do so.”

The probation service had – separately – told Kelly he was being recalled to prison as he had been failing to keep to the terms of his licence.

But Kelly, it seemed, had gone to ground. He remained at large for three years until he finally handed himself in to Swindon police last autumn.

Kelly, of Kennington Lane, Lambeth, pleaded guilty at the magistrates’ court to possession with intent to supply crack cocaine and heroin in Swindon on February 9, 2016.

Tom Wilkins, defending, said his client had been in touch with the man in whose car he had been found by the police. That man told him no further action was being taken by police in relation to his case and Kelly assumed the same applied to him.

He had not fled the country in the four years since his arrest but had taken steps to lead an “honest, law-abiding life”.

Jailing him for two years and four months, an unimpressed Judge Peter Crabtree said Kelly knew he had a responsibility to answer his police bail regardless of what his co-accused had been told.