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.

He estimated similar thefts could run into millions of euro yearly.

Superintendent Vincent Duggan suggested it is a crime that is going to escalate as has been witnessed in Scotland where the authorities are having to weld down cast iron manhole covers to prevent them being stolen. Road signs are also been stolen there and the metal melted down.

Supt Duggan said he had investigated a number of thefts in his own region from factories and unoccupied buildings.

About €52,000 worth of copper was stolen from a factory in west Cork and €30,000 of various metals, including nickel, taken from another.

“Between Macroom and Ballyvourney, thieves cut down 500 metres of telephone wire for the metal inside the cable. They also broke into the disused Irish college in Ballyvourney and ripped copper valued at €1,500 out of the place. In the process, they damaged asbestos in the boiler room, which took €40,000 to make safe. They also stripped heavy duty cable out of the former General Instrument factory in Macroom,” Supt Duggan said.

The gangs have also targeted ESB and Telecom compounds and even risked electrocution at ESB transformer stations while looking for valuable metal. Supt Duggan said such companies had beefed up their security following talks with gardaí.

“These are highly professional gangs and they know exactly what they are looking for. The same thing is happening in Kerry and west Limerick, so I presume it’s happening all over the country. The British police are saying it is one of the biggest types of crimes they are having to fight at present and it has the potential to become huge here,” said Supt Duggan.

He said gardaí had intelligence which led them to believe the metal was being transported to Britain and then sent to China and India.

“Copper is worth €6,000 a tonne on the open market, but scrap copper is fetching €3,000 so there’s huge money to be made. It’s more worrying because metal prices are increasing the whole time,” he said.

The gangs often take their cache into woods and will burn the plastic coating off the cable to retrieve the metal.

“We have sent our crime prevention people out to factories to warn them of the problem, but we also need the public’s help.

“If people see scrap metal dumped in woodland areas or somebody burning cables they should ring their local garda stationimmediately. Apart from the crimes there is also an environmental issue caused by burning plastics,” said Supt Duggan.