A new three-part documentary will be aired on the 30-year hunt for missing drug smuggler Julian Chisholm.
The new documentary, to be shown on BBC Alba, details how he masterminded a £100 million cocaine shipment to Ullapool.
Chisholm, also known as Mr X, has not been seen since 1993 when the former Granite City worker escaped from a maximum security jail in Alicante, Spain, where he was awaiting extradition to stand trial in Scotland.
Chisholm organised for a massive haul of cocaine to be transported from South America to Clashnessie Bay, north of Ullapool in the Highlands.
The haul was found in a van outside Newtonmore, Inverness-shire, in January 1991 in what was Britain’s biggest ever drugs seizure at the time.
Five of Chisholm’s accomplices were caught and sent to prison but he fled and remains one of the UK’s most wanted men to this day.
The documentary, Cocain is na Klondykers, (Cocaine and the Klondykers) will explore ‘Operation Klondyke’, the huge surveillance operation involving police and customs officials that brought down Chisholm’s gang.
Forensic artist Hew Morrison has created an image which ages Chisholm, who would now be 61, based on an original mugshot released when he first went on the run.
The artist was inspired to create the image after listening to The Press and Journal’s true crime podcast ‘Hunting Mr X.’
Mr Morrison said: “Ideally in a situation like this you would have family photos to look at so you would be able to see what the parents looked like when they got older.
“We don’t have any of that with Julian Chisholm, we don’t know much about him.
“He has got quite a thick neck and deep set eyes and he has a small scar on his right eyebrow so I kept that in the image.
“You can see past (plastic surgery) if you look hard enough by focusing on the eyes. I think he could still be recognisable.
“Last year there was an Italian mafia member who had been on the run for the same amount of time as Chisholm and he was apprehended.
“We are hoping that this image may lead to Chisholm being captured as well.”
Police will pore over DNA evidence to find Julian Chisholm
Former senior police officer Graeme Pearson, who was director of the former Scottish Crime and Drugs Enforcement Agency for three years, said police would still be keen to follow up any leads of Chisholm.
He said: “It’s not within the DNA of law enforcement to let anything go so if the slightest bit of information comes in that reveals he is alive you can bet they will be on top of that and will want to arrest him.”
Chisholm, who was brought up in Blairgowrie, Perthshire, first found wealth as a deep-sea diver in the North Sea in the 1980s and owned a flat in Edinburgh’s New Town along with a Porsche Carrera Turbo.
He quit the oil business in 1987 and headed to Estepona in southern Spain.
He first came to the attention of HMRC in 1989 when they heard he was involved in large-scale drug smuggling.
Journalist and presenter Anna MacLeod, who went in search of Chisholm for the series, said: “Chisholm came to Aberdeen and went to work on the rigs like many other people from all over Scotland and the UK. But Chisholm took a different path.
“The eighties drug scene was changing rapidly and Julian Chisholm opted to put himself right in the middle of it. And I wanted to understand what made him do that. I wanted to get a better understanding of the world in which Chisholm was operating.”
The first episode of Cocain is na Klondykers (Cocaine and the Klondykers) will be shown on BBC Alba on Tuesday at 9pm.
Where can I listen to Hunting Mr X?
Hunting Mr X is the first season of Impact Podcasts, an investigative podcast from The Press and Journal which was published last year.
The series is available on all major podcast platforms including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.
You can also listen to Impact Podcasts here on The Press and Journal website.
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