The cannabis and ecstasy at the centre of a Supreme Court drugs plot trial were worth in excess of $450,000, the jury heard yesterday.

Vernon Simons, 24, is accused of conspiring with his employer Shannon Tucker to bring them to Bermuda stashed in construction machine parts.

He protests his innocence, although Tucker, 33, has already pleaded guilty to plotting to import the drugs and is awaiting sentence.

The discovery was made by a sniffer dog checking cargo at Bermuda airport last January. Police found 584 ecstacy tablets and several packages of cannabis inside parts for a lifting machine that Tucker ordered from Philadelphia.

Narcotics officers took the illicit drugs out, replaced them with a chunk of lumber and a brick, then welded the metal parts back together and returned them to FedEx. They watched as Simons and Tucker arrived to pick them up, and arrested both men shortly afterwards.

The jury has heard how, in taped Police interviews, detectives put it to Simons that he contributed $7,000 and Tucker contributed $10,000 to get the drugs shipped back to Bermuda in the machine parts, Simons responded that he did not have $7,000 and "it's not true at all".

He went on to blame a third man, Matthew Clarke, for the plot. The jury has heard from prosecutors that Mr. Clarke is now dead.

Simons told detectives last January: "I believe that Matthew Clarke had known something about it. He must have planned on putting it in Shannon's machine parts and having it brought back here without him knowing. I mean, that's like setting somebody up."

Yesterday, the jury heard evidence from narcotics expert Detective Constable Warren Bundy about the various ways they could have been packaged and sold on the streets of Bermuda.

He said the cannabis, which weighed a total of 8167.6 grams, could be worth up to $408,380 depending on how it was sold. He valued the ecstacy tablets at up to $43,800.

The case continues.