Gangs looting metals and selling them on to China

GARDAÍ believe highly professional gangs are looting copper and other valuable metals and shipping them out to China to feed the country’s insatiable industrial appetite.

The gangs have become so blatant they have even cut down telephone lines to extract valuable metal within the plastic cable.

A senior Garda, investigating the theft of hundreds of thousands of euro worth of metal in west Cork, believes the practice is rampant nationwide.