Busted: Police recover 22 stolen cars

Officials say most vehicles went to K-P, but fails to identify any thieves caught

RAWALPINDI: Rawalpindi police on Saturday claimed to have busted gangs of car thieves, recovering nearly two dozen cars worth millions from their possession.

However, officials failed to identify how many of these car thieves they had caught.

Addressing a news briefing at Police Lines Number 1 in Rawalpindi on Saturday, City Police Officer (CPO) Israr Ahmed Khan Abbasi said that they had recovered 22 stolen vehicles of different makes.

In this regard, Abbasi said that they had compiled data of stolen vehicles, transferred it onto laptops which were then handed to police officials posted at  all entry and exit points of the city.

The CPO said that in view of the rising incidents of car thefts in the garrison city, he said SP Investigations Maria Mehmood of Crime Investigation Agency had been tasked to bust gangs involved in these robberies.

The SP subsequently formed a special team of the Anti-Car Lifting Cell (ACLC) which then tracked down the stolen, snatched or tampered vehicles from different parts of Punjab.

Abbasi disclosed that most of these stolen cars went to people in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa who then either returned the cars to their original owners against a certain sum of money or altered their serial numbers before selling them to different people.

Abbasi added that in addition to the ACLC teams, special teams had also been formed at the police station level to control car lifting.

After recovering these vehicles, he said that many had already been returned to their owners.

He added that police were trying to crack down on car snatching and theft from the city and had installed cameras and erected pickets exit and entry points of the city to monitor the activities of car lifters.

A special control room has also been made in Rescue 15 in this regard, he said.

Responding to a question about rising street crime in the garrison city, CPO Abbasi said that they had devised a special strategy to reduce the ratio of street crime by deploying all extra officials from different places to special pickets around the city.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 27^th, 2016.