A man accused of shooting two drug dealers on a remote Cornish farm spoke after their death about how one of them “wouldn’t die” and how he’d broken a shotgun by hitting him with it, a court heard today.

Thomas Haigh had acted as a drugs mule for Brett Flournoy and David Griffiths on a previous occasion, bringing cocaine into the UK from Brazil, but was scared he would get caught if he went again, his co-accused Ross Stone told their double murder trial.

Stone, 28, giving evidence in his own defence, said Haigh, 26, had talked about killing the two men in the days before they died, fearing he would end up like a friend in a South American prison who was caught on a drugs run.

He told the jury at Truro Crown Court that he arrived back at his farm near St Austell in Cornwall on June 16 last year, after a trio of anguished phone calls from Haigh, to find the bodies of Griffiths and Flournoy 100 yards apart, dead from gunshot wounds.

When he found Haigh, he said, he was wearing only a pair of skiing trousers and was “pretty worked up, covered in sweat”, claiming that the men had beaten him up with a piece of wood.

“He got in (the truck) and started ranting and raving, he said they came down and started beating him up,” Stone told the court.

“He said, ‘Dave wouldn’t die’, he said he had to hit him with the shotgun and he said it broke when he hit him with it.”

The badly burned bodies of Mr Griffiths, a father of three originally from Plymouth but living in Bracknell, Berkshire, and Mr Flournoy, a boxer and father of two from Bebington, Wirral, Merseyside, were found dumped in the back of a van buried at Sunny Corner farm, Trenance Downs, in July last year. They had both been shot.

Stone said he had illegally borrowed a shotgun from a neighbour in case a ferocious, 12-stone bull mastiff the pair brought as a guard dog got loose. After finding it snapped in two after the men were dead he initially dumped it on farmland before giving it back to its owner, who had it destroyed.

The court had already been told by Stone that after unsuccessfully attempting to fob the pair off by claiming he had lost his passport, Haigh began to talk of killing them after learning they were coming to Cornwall to see him, a few days before the prosecution say the pair died at Stone’s farm.

Stone described the plans as “hot air” and did not take them seriously.

Stone said he became involved with the “daunting” pair, whom it has been claimed worked for an IRA drugs gang in Liverpool, after trying to help a friend who owned Griffiths money.

But he, like Haigh, ended up owing them between £30,000 and £40,000 after a bag containing more than 4kg of drugs including cocaine, amphetamines and MDMA, which he was sent without asking for, went missing from his home on New Year’s Eve in 2010.

He said he faced constant death threats “from the first day” against him and his family from the pair and their associates, who would ring him on his mobile phone “every 10-15 minutes”.

He even borrowed money from his mother and allowed the pair to turn his home into a cocaine processing plant, supplying users in Cornwall.

In April last year, he told the court, Griffiths and Flournoy arrived unannounced at the home of his partner Laura’s parents, hours after she had given birth to their second child, a daughter, because he turned his phone off while they were in the labour ward.

They brought with them Haigh, who they said was to help Stone with cannabis plants he was growing to pay off his debt.

Stone told the court that initially he had intended to report the deaths to the police, even going as far as driving with his mother to a police station in Newquay.

But he said he feared what the drugs gang associates of the two men would do if they found out what had happened to them and instead buried and burned the men’s bodies in their van.

“There were people still who knew the address of my kids and my family, who had made threats to kill them,” Stone said.

“My fears for my family and my children were greater than what I have been through up until now.”

Haigh, formerly of Huddersfield, and Stone, from St Austell, both deny two counts of murder. Stone admits obstructing a coroner by burying the bodies.

The trial continues.