Satnavs stolen from cars
Police have issued a warning after a spate of thefts from cars.
Officers received seven reports of vehicles being targeted, mostly from the Loose and Shepway areas last Wednesday and Thursday.
Satnavs, tools and an mp3 player were taken.
Advice includes locking doors and windows, parking in a welllit area and not leaving items on display.
People can also list valuable items such as satnavs on www. immobilise.com or security mark them, so they can be identified if they are stolen and later found. A gang of three who smuggled £12m of heroin and cocaine into a village by helicopter have been jailed for a total of 52 years.
Pilot Niels Wartenbergh, 28, and passenger Ricardo Vorstenbosch, 27, dropped their illicit haul in Yalding in April before continuing to Redhill, Surrey, where National Crime Agency officers swooped.
The Dutch pair had begun their journey in Belgium but were being tracked as part of an operation which also involved the Metropolitan Police, Border Force and the Dutch and Belgian authorities.
Wartenbergh, who was learning to fly much larger aircraft at the time, dropped under radar coverage deliberately and made the unscheduled stop near the village.
A short while later officers from the Met pulled over a hired silver BMW as it travelled towards London on the M26 near Sevenoaks and arrested 39-year-old driver Joseph Peel, from Kensington.
Six holdalls containing around 43kg of cocaine and 60kg of heroin were found in the boot, alongside more than 30 encrypted mobile phones.
Data supplied by the hire company showed the vehicle had been in Yalding at the same time as the helicopter.
Later that day Dutch police searched Vorstenbosch’s Eindhoven home and uncovered 3kg of cocaine, a drug press, vacuum packing machines and a gun.
All three pleaded guilty to conspiring to import class A drugs and at Croydon Crown Court last Friday Wartenbergh and Vorstenbosch were sentenced to 18 years, while Peel was sentenced to 16 years.
Gary Fennelly, head of NCA’s Gatwick border investigation team, said: “This organised crime group engaged the highly skilled services of a helicopter pilot to attempt to avoid border security by flying under the radar.
“In addition to recovering more than 100kg of class A drugs, the operation prevented crime on a much wider scale by denying the sale of drugs worth millions to the crime group and preventing them from reinvesting the proceeds.”