Seventeen luxury vehicles valued at about R3-million were stolen off a showroom dealership floor next to the police’s provincial headquarters in Durban yesterday.
Not only did the syndicate manage to steal and drive the vehicles away - undetected by the law-enforcement neighbours - but it also succeeded in disconnecting the alarm system of Mecca Motors, stealing the CCTV cameras and taking the data and documentation of all the vehicles in the showroom.
“It was right on our doorstep,” said police spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Vince Mdunge.
However, provincial commissioner Mmamonnye Ngobeni said there was no need for red faces, as the headquarters was not a police station and was monitored by security guards.
“We should be commending the police on their swift arrest of three suspects in connection with the theft. This was a sophisticated crime and well planned. Police are still investigating how the theft was carried out, how they got hold of the keys, or if this was an inside job.
“Obviously when this many cars are stolen, it will set off an alarm. The Hawks have also been called in,” she said.
By yesterday morning police had located one of the stolen vehicles, an imported Hyundai mini-bus vehicle, and arrested three suspects - all foreign nationals.
Hours later another nine vehicles had been recovered - two in eManzimtoti and seven in central Durban.
Included in the full list of stolen vehicles were 12 4x4s, three minibus-type vehicles, one Mercedes and a BMW.
The recoveries were made by a task team which was set up by Ngobeni immediately after the arrests, Mdunge said.
The three arrests were made early yesterday after police spotted one of the vehicles at the corner of Cross and Leopold streets.
They watched the vehicle for a few hours until the three men - with two firearms stolen from a safe at Mecca Motors - approached the car.
Mdunge said the car had run out of fuel, and so the suspects had made a plan to refuel it. After the vehicle was started, the police pounced.
Another vehicle at the scene, a gold double-cab Nissan, was driven by one of the suspects. Mdunge said it was registered as belonging to the owner of a “large” vehicle dealership in Gauteng, but had not been stolen from him. The owner was suspected to be a part of the gang.
“The suspects were driven from Gauteng province to KwaZulu-Natal. We have strong suspicions that the members of the gang were going to take the vehicles back to Gauteng and then distribute them to other parts of Africa, including Mozambique,” Mdunge said.
When asked whether the Gauteng dealership owner could be behind the thefts in order to benefit his own business, Mdunge replied that that was possible.
Waqas Khan, a manager at Mecca Motors, said yesterday the number of cars stolen was estimated to be 17 because all the documents and data about the vehicles were missing, so there was no way to reconcile them.
“We are just counting how many vehicles could have been parked in the empty spaces on the showroom floor.”
He and other staff had recognised the three arrested suspects as part of a group of six or seven people who were “posing as customers” and “window shopping” the day before.
Apart from the empty floor space where the vehicles once stood, there were also rings of bright yellow spray paint around bunches of keys left behind on the floor and on car bonnets by the thieves.
Upstairs, circles were also painted around the disarmed alarm system, while a gaping hole in the ceiling indicated how the thieves gained entry.
Khan said he first noticed something strange while driving home from the beachfront at about 3.30am yesterday, and seeing the showroom’s lights on.
“I drove around the building and saw that the doors (the aluminium garage doors) were fully open. I phoned my uncle, who owns the shop, and he called the police. I drove around again and this time saw that the doors were half opened.”
After parking near the building, he flagged down a police patrol vehicle, Khan said.
Police searched the premises, but there was no sign of the perpetrators.
Khan said all their vehicles were imported from Japan and exported to Zambia, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Malawi. - The Mercury