Britons are gassed as tent thieves strike again in France
A FAMILY robbed while holidaying in France claim they are the latest victims of thieves who knocked them unconscious by piping gas into their tent.
Hayley Kearns, 28, was heading to the Mediterranean with her parents, her brother and his girlfriend when they were attacked at an overnight rest stop on a motorway.
Miss Kearns, brother Byron, 20, and his girlfriend Nic James, 31, awoke groggily in their trailer tent to find the window ripped open and valuables gone.
They said raiders took £2,000 in cash, their mobile phones, iPads, a Kindle and bank cards.
The robbers had also taken their keys and ransacked their car while they slept, littering the service station with their possessions.
Miss Kearns said French police told her East European gangs were preying on holidaymakers. Other British families have reported similar raids this summer, and yesterday the Caravan and Camping Club urged tourists not to sleep at French service stations and to con- sider buying gas monitors. Miss Kearns and her family were attacked on August 2 at the Aire de la Bouble on the A71 from Bourges to Clermont-Ferrand. They were travelling in two cars towing a cara- van and the trailer tent. The thieves even stole Mr Kearns’ trousers as they searched for his car keys.
Miss Kearns’ parents Gill, 55, and Tony, 53, had slept in the caravan and were not robbed. But Miss Kearns believes they were gassed too, because their dog was with them but did not wake up.
The customer services agent from Yate, Gloucestershire, added: ‘Even my parent’s dog didn’t make a noise, and he usually barks at anything. It makes me think they did something to him too.’
She said she woke up in the early hours and saw a shadowy figure, but was unable to rouse her brother before she was overcome with sleep. The next morning the family were ‘completely out of it’, she said, adding: ‘It was a really busy service station with people everywhere. I tried to wake my brother up but I couldn’t and then I don’t remember anything until the morning.
‘We have to have been knocked out. There was a tiny slit in the trailer tent, just big enough to put a pipe through. The police said we were the second or third group to have been done at that service station and the group were moving slowly south from Paris.’
Just weeks earlier on the same motorway, the Chadwick family lost possessions worth £2,000 in a similar raid near Bourges, while Debbie Keeney and Bob John, of Matson, Kent, were targeted at Lancon de Provence, losing cash, jewellery, passports and credit cards.