A woman caught with £5bn in Bitcoin in the UK's highest ever value money laundering investigation has been jailed for 11 years and eight months - after nearly five years on the run.

Zhimin Qian, 47, sat up in bed looking stunned when police kicked open the bedroom door of an Airbnb in a York suburb on 22 April last year.

She vanished and went on the run after officers seized more than 61,000 Bitcoin in the country's biggest cryptocurrency seizure in a raid of her rented £5m home next to Hampstead Heath.

Qian - who fled China after carrying out a huge fraud and arrived in the UK in 2017 on a false St Kitts and Nevis passport in the name of Yadi Zhang - pleaded guilty to two money laundering offences at Southwark Crown Court.

Qian wept in the dock as she was sentenced to 11 years and

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