Robert Dawes was finally arrested in Dubai on an international warrant but is now living free on the Costa del Sol.
For five years a man named in a British court as "the general" has been pursued by detectives in a multimillion-pound operation. Over the past decade Robert Dawes has moved from a two-up, two-down terraced house on an estate outside Nottingham to a base in Dubai and finally to a villa on the Costa del Sol. Police believe he has left a trail of destruction as one of the heads of a crime syndicate that flooded the UK with millions of pounds of cocaine, heroin and cannabis. He has been identified in nine UK investigations involving large scale shipments. Dawes is wanted in the Netherlands in connection with the murder of a teacher, Gerard Meesters; in Spain , where police have identified him as "the boss of an important English drug trafficking organisation"; and in the UK, where Nottinghamshire detectives are seeking him over the alleged commissioning of the murder of David Draycott in October 2002. So when investigators from the Serious Organised Crime Agency, w...