Police chief called racist over alert on Romanian raiders
A SENIOR police officer has revealed he was branded a ‘racist’ after issuing a warning over Romanian crime gangs.
Chief Superintendent Julian Innes, Police Scotland commander for the Highland and Islands division, said he was criticised for his comments, which f ollowed a spate of reported incidents.
But he has defended his decision to go public with his fears – and said the ‘same pattern’ was emerging in recent weeks because organised criminals view the region as a ‘soft touch’.
Mr Innes announced last October that East European gangs were suspected of committing crimes that were ‘planned and researched’, with thieves ‘casing the joint’ before moving in.
It followed up to 50 incidents being reported at homes and businesses in communities such as Fort William, Inverness-shire, Nairn and Ullapool, Wester Ross. A series of arrests were made and at least one man from Romania has been convicted over a theft in Inverness-shire.
But it is understood more than one local politician privately questioned the language used by Mr Innes when he issued the warning.
Quizzed on the issue yesterday, he said: ‘I deliberately took the conscious decision last year to tell local communities that were being targeted by Romanian crime gangs.
‘I got a few slaps for that, and there were observations f rom people about me being racist. That’s absolutely not the case.
‘It was fact that these people are Romanian, they are l i ving in Glasgow, they are organised and they were targeting rural areas, particularly this area.
‘As a result of making that public, we got tremendous public support. I’m very grateful for the way that was covered in the media, and we actually, within a couple of days, stopped two vans with travelling housebreakers in it, and bogus workmen, and another car that we stopped that was reported to us with a housebreaker that was being driven to commit crimes.’
However, Mr Innes added that the issue had not disappeared.
He said: ‘We’ve recently had Eastern Europeans back again, targeting Scottish and Southern Energy property, at Evanton [in Easter Ross], and again we caught them.’
The senior officer vowed to repeat his public warnings if required, adding: ‘If I know or have information we’re being targeted, I will be very public about it.’
However, the crime problem is not confined to the Highlands.
In a more serious example, Romanian Pardalian Rostas, who was jailed in his own country for robbery, illegally entered Scotland after being released and later raped a woman in the street in Glasgow.
He bought a one-way ticket back to Romania but was arrested and returned on a European extradition warrant.
He was found guilty of the 2014 rape and jailed for seven years. His
‘Tell people they were targeted’
case chillingly mirrored that of Slovak murderer Marek Harcar, who killed businesswoman Moira Jones, 40, i n Queen’s Park in Glasgow in 2009.
Like Rostas, he had previous convictions for violence and attempted to avoid justice by returning to his homeland only to be extradited back to the UK. Harcar is currently serving a minimum 25-year term for the attack.
Last year Robert Buczek, 24, was jailed for life for murdering 85-year- old Eleanor Whitelaw in her Edinburgh home.
The Pole had a previous conviction i n his native country for assaulting a woman pensioner but was still able to enter Scotland.