Expensive construction and farming machinery is being stolen in Ireland and the UK by organised crime gangs. It turns up in places as far away as Iraq and South Africa, writes MARK HENNESSY
THE IRAQI man came to Ireland in midsummer to inspect a €300,000 Mercedes truck used to pump concrete up 12 storeys on building sites. He went home satisfied that his purchase would shortly be on its way.
However, the “sellers” were not sellers, but highly organised thieves. In late September, having struck the deal, they stole the Mercedes, with its highly priced Schwing pump, from a locked yard in Kilcock, Co Kildare.
From there, it went by road to Belfast; by sea on to Birkenhead, near Liverpool; and from there to Immingham port in Humberside for shipment onwards to Antwerp in Belgium. There, it was put on a ship bound for Turkey.
However, the Garda Stolen Vehicle Unit in Dublin’s Harcourt Street was in pursuit and, having tracked the Mercedes to Antwerp, managed to stop it being unloaded in Turkey and sent on to Iraq.
“It’s still on the high seas on its way back,” says Garda Sgt Finbarr Garland. The Iraqi buyer, who had been given forged, but convincing papers, is now out of pocket. “He paid the street price for it.”
The machinery was tracked down by dogged detective work by Garland, who had circulated photographs of it to police forces in the United Kingdom, in Rotterdam and Antwerp ports, and in France and Spain.
This is but one of a growing number of thefts of diggers, tractors and lifting equipment, which are being targeted by organised gangs in both Ireland and the UK for sale in eastern Europe and further afield.
In the UK, according to the Metropolitan Police, more than 800 JCBs have been stolen in the past year alone, along with 620 tractors, more than 520 mini-diggers and a similar number of telehandler forklifts.
“The thefts are very well-organised. You don’t go joyriding diggers. This is their day-job. It is very lucrative,” says Det Con Ian Elliott of the Metropolitan Police’s Plant and Agricultural National Intelligence Unit. “It is very easy for a Polish lorry to come over with a load, deliver it and then pick up stolen equipment for the journey back, covered in the back of the lorry. It looks innocuous.”
The difficulties facing criminals in England are lessened by the fact that a machine can be stolen in the dead of night and, within hours, can be on the back of a truck on a ferry to the continent.
In Northern Ireland, the PSNI, too, reports a rise in equipment thefts, though much of the machinery there is broken apart and shipped abroad for the illegal parts market, with some ending up as far away as South Africa. Some of the crimes in the North are believed to involve dissident republicans.
“They are into everything, from fake DVDs to fake chainsaws, so I would be very surprised if they weren’t involved in this,” says one PSNI officer.
And criminal gangs believe in imports as much as exports. Two Irishmen were recently given five- and seven-year sentences in Bruges, Belgium, for attempting to steal machines in Belgium and Holland and take them to Ireland.
SINCE 2007,the Metropolitan Police has urged heavy-equipment owners to tag their machines with Cesar "warning triangles", which allows police to track down original owners, along with electronic tags that can be hidden in a vehicle's body and read by scanner.
So far, 25,000 machines in the UK have been tagged. However, the work of the police is not helped by industry practices. Heavy machines, though valuable, do not have unique computer-coded keys “even though that happens for a five-grand Fiesta”, according to Elliott. However, JCB is shortly to announce that it will become the first manufacturer in the world to produce a fully secure vehicle from 2010.
“For us it is fantastic. It shows that the industry is listening to us,” says Elliott, who claims that before Cesar triangles, British police were recovering just 5 per cent of stolen equipment. “How do you identify a JCB? It is big, yellow and has lots of mud on it, so it’s not that easy.”
Now, the recovery rate for tagged equipment has risen to 30 per cent. New statistics issued by the three-strong Metropolitan Police unit show that Cesar triangles deter thieves. The price of each Cesar tag includes a contribution to pay for the unit, run by Elliott, who this week briefed hundreds of British police about the problem and the best ways of tackling the criminal gangs.
Soon, the Metropolitan Police is to seek the co-operation of An Garda Síochána and the PSNI to ensure that all are working on similar systems.
“We will try to replicate what we are doing with others,” says Elliott.
