Breakdown Lorry Law Breaker
How many of you have walked up to where you had parked your car to find it missing, replaced by a sniggering sticker on the kerb, informing you that your 4-wheeled sweetheart now nestles in the dungeons of the municipal compound? More than a few.
But then again, how grateful we are to see a breakdown lorry appear when we are stranded on the hard shoulder with an inert and sulking car?
But there is now a third kind of breakdown lorry – or there was until the police arrested its owner/driver: a man who has spent recent years picking up legally parked cars and taking them off to a scrapyard to collect between 100 and 150 euros for each one from an equally crooked scrap-yard owner.
The Guardia Civil learned that he had literally stolen (through his own admission) hundreds of cars in this manner in the last three years, within the our province and just over the Jaen border, as well.
Of these hundreds of cars, the police centred their investigation on 80 of them, 76 of which have already ceased to exist other than as spare parts. Obviously, these cars were reported stolen and the receiving scrapyard certainly didn’t darles la baja (report them as decommissioned; retired from the roads)
The gleeful grua scoured the province, looking for prey, choosing most from the metropolitan area and border towns between Granada and Jaen. In this fashion he literally scooped up any car that he considered ‘abandoned’ ( a pretty liberal interpretation of the word) and whistled them off to the scrappy. When he was out ‘working’ in this fashion he wore a uniform that was very similar to the Policia Local and had the words Grua Municipal on his back, so as not to raise suspicion.
So convincing was his disguise that some town halls, believing him to belong to a bona-fide company, actually hired him to pick up abandoned cars and take them to the municipal vehicle compound.
(News: Metropolitan Granada, Granada, Andalucia)
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