The Guardia Civil arrested a couple who specialised in stealing vehicles and selling them for parts on the Internet.
The Green Meanies might not have been so keen to nab the blighter had it not been for the fact that the car thieves had allegedly stolen one of their unmarked vehicles and sold it off, little by little.
Their unmarked, Seat León was stolen in the province of Toledo in February this year and the police immediately began investigating but both the culprit and his partner had gone into hiding. The police discovered that the ‘team’ specialised in Seat/Volkswagens and operated mostly in the centre of the country.
When they ‘lifted’ a car, the 29-year-old woman would go ahead in another car as a scout just in case there were any police road checks.
The car was finally tracked down to El Casar de Escalona, which is in Jaén… well most of it, not that it made much difference because the couple, residents of Torrijos, had torched it after abandoning it, for good measure.
The police had hit jackpot in March when a car owner reported that his vehicle had been half inched (stolen) in the Barrio de La Fortuna in Madrid but returned to him by the Policía Nacional. The vehicle owner had scoured the Internet looking for replacement parts and found some looking specially like his.
The police made a note of all the parts sold by this website user and saw that the website user had sold over a hundred Seat, car parts. They tracked down the user (using the IP address and other info) to a chalet in Torrijos. When the police came calling, only the 29 year old woman was at home and she was immediately arrested. Her partner remains with his whereabout unknown.
Since the bust the police have located three stolen vehicles; a Seat Ibiza, Seat Córdoba and an Audi A6, sets of tools for removing car parts and bucket loads of car electrical and mechanical parts.
(News: Torrijos, Toledo, Castilla-La Mancha)