Two members of a drugs gang that flooded the streets with �50m of heroin, smuggled into the UK inside ovens, have been told by top judges they deserved every day of their jail terms.

Iqbal Nadeem Khan, 36, of Landseer Avenue, Manor Park, shipped and distributed the drugs, while Mustaque Ahmed, 32, of no fixed address, was a “highly trusted” member of the gang which sold them on.

The pair were sentenced at Croydon Crown Court earlier this year. Khan was jailed for 19 years and Ahmed for 20.

Khan admitted two counts of conspiring to import, and one of conspiring to supply, the class A drug and Ahmed was convicted, after a trial in February, of conspiring to supply. They were last week at the Appeal Court, with their lawyers arguing their sentences were “too long”.

But their appeals were dismissed by three of the country’s most senior judges, who said that “no complaint” could be made about the jail terms. The court heard the ringleader of the plot Adnanul Jaigiodor is still at large after escaping from police following a high-speed chase.

Khan was described as being one notch down from him and was involved in arranging the importation of a large shipment of heroin from Iran, hidden inside heavy-duty ovens.

The ovens were delivered to addresses where the gang would then remove the drugs and sell them on. Some of the shipment was seized by officers and replaced with dummy drugs, enabling police to track the gang.

Their probe revealed the gang imported 260kg of drugs, which the court heard had a wholesale value of �4m, but would have earned the dealers �50m when cut and sold in “street deals”.

Lawyers for both men argued their jail terms were “too long”, because they were not at the top of the gang’s structure and were acting on Jaigiodor’s instructions. Mr Justice Cooke, sitting with Lord Justice Stanley Burton and Judge Peter Rook QC, said neither sentence was “excessive” for the scale of the operation.