Migrant gangs in M- way stunt
Crooks cheat death for £ 150
SHOCKED police have revealed how Romanian thieves are targeting speeding lorries to steal their cargos.
In the audacious stunt dubbed the “Romanian Rollover”, crooks in vans chase their prey along the motorway and pull up to the bumper so the trucker cannot see them in his mirrors.
Gang members then climb out of a hatch cut into the roof and slide down the windscreen on to the bonnet of their own moving vehicle and break into the back of the target lorry using a crowbar.
They form a human chain to pass the stolen goods back to the van via the hatch in the roof.
Criminal
Romania’s EU membership has allowed its criminal gangs to move freely across Europe to carry out these kinds of crimes, which police believe can net them up to £ 30,000 per day.
Superintendent Paul Keasey of West Midlands Police, who is leading a nationwide crackdown on road crime, said: “Romanian criminals are working in gangs capable of stealing £ 30,000 of goods in a day.
“That’s the sort of thing you didn’t have to tackle maybe 10 years ago. We have had that infl ux of people coming into the UK.
“Their propensity to commit crimes where the risk appears to me to outweigh the gain has most surprised me. I mean, would you climb on to the front of a moving vehicle for as little as £ 150?
“We need to understand the culture to understand their willingness to take risks and the level of control and manip- ulation within their own hierarchy, which is often feudal.
“Often it’s a rural system. They have their own rules, their own controlling mechanisms. They are far more organised than we originally thought.”
There are a bigger percentage of Romanians in Britain’s prisons than any other foreign group – with 674 of the 128,000- strong population in jail or on remand.
Last year, 11 were jailed for two years each after admitting a “Romanian Rollover” theft on the M6 in Staffordshire.
Their Citroen Relay was followed by police as it travelled north on the M6 through Birmingham and was eventually stopped at Keele services in Staffordshire.
The van was found to have a homemade lockable hatch in its roof and inside were a range of power tools.
The convictions came as part of Operation Trivium, dedicated to tackling foreign national offenders.
Gangs have successfully carried out robberies in Romania itself as well as Germany, Ireland and Britain – stealing everything from TV sets to cigarettes.
A spate of about 50 such cases, which sometimes involve decoy cars driving in front of the lorry to slow it down, was reported by police in northern Germany in 2013. Irish police believe that the same tactic led to the theft of cigarettes worth £ 71,000 in March this year.