PESHAWAR, Dec 28: Of a total of 950 vehicles received at police laboratories for verification in the year 2005, some 60 per cent were found to have been stolen, sources told Dawn on Thursday.
The figure, however, is far less in year-on-year comparison, as in 2004, about 75 per cent of a total of 1,180 vehicles examined were found stolen.
The sources attributed the declining figure to police’s inefficiency to detect theft rather than fall in the incidents of snatching. Modern techniques used by car lifters also had a lot to do with this so-called decline, they said.
It’s no more a secret that the stolen vehicles are driven to tribal areas or safe places in settled areas where they are cannibalised and their spares are sold in the market.
According to the sources, car lifting has now become an organised crime, and the people involved in it have got modern tools to change the engine number, the chassis number and the number plate of the stolen vehicles in such a way that police laboratories fail to detect the forgery.
“Police laboratories are not equipped with state-of-the-art devices to check the authenticity of vehicles,” said the sources.
It were, in fact, the documents that helped police detect theft in most of the cases as the engines and chassis numbers were tampered with in a near-undetectable way, they added.
“Besides Afghanistan, the stolen cars also have a good market in the Provincially Administrated Tribal Area (Pata) because the Customs Act is not applicable there. These vehicles are marked as NCP i.e. non-custom paid in Pata from where they can easily be shifted to Afghanistan,” said the sources.
After the narcotics trade, car lifting is considered to be the most profitable business the world over. In European countries and Japan, 1,000 to 5,000 cars are stolen in one day.
“Car lifters here have got a complete set of 26 keys of different sizes and shapes, called master key,” said the sources, adding that even the government of Pakistan did not have the master key, used in relief and rescue operations.
They said the proximity of tribal areas to Afghanistan was one big reason behind the flourishing crime of carjacking in the NWFP. “Shoba bazaar and Kabari bazaar are replete with second-hand auto spares. People from as far as Punjab come to these bazaars to buy spares for their vehicles,” they said.