A FUGITIVE who fled the UK after an incident at a North Yorkshire airfield turned himself in to police in Gibraltar.

Jason Waterman - whose nicknames include Jugs and Jumbo - was wanted in connection with drug trafficking, and fled the country after drugs worth £1.2m were found in an aircraft at Bagby Airfield near Thirsk.

The National Crime Agency issued a fresh appeal for information about him this week, and said Waterman - originally from Watford - "arrived without warning, dripping salt water and carrying a small bag of wet clothing", late on Monday evening.

The 32-year-old refused to say how he had reached Gibraltar after fleeing the country in October 2015, but said it "wasn’t through the frontier".

An NCA spokesman said Waterman was believed to have been at Bagby Airfield shortly after a light aircraft arrived from the Netherlands, which Border Force officers searched and found a briefcase containing seven kilos of cocaine with a potential street value of £1.2m from the airfield.

The aircraft pilot was arrested but later found not guilty of importation offences.

Waterman told Gibraltar police he had seen the NCA’s appeal on the BBC’s Crimewatch Roadshow and wanted to hand himself in, and the authorities are now seeking to extradite him under a European Arrest Warrant.

Brian Shaw, NCA north east operations manager, said: "It might sound like a cushy number, sitting around watching Crimewatch Roadshow on a Monday morning, but life as a fugitive is hard and stressful.

"The NCA first issued an appeal for Waterman in London nearly a year ago. Clearly something about the new appeal made him crack. To everyone else feeling the stress of being on the run I would say we are patient people, we keep the pressure on, and we never stop looking for you."