Five people have been charged with receiving stolen goods, recycling vehicles and abandoning special waste and have received a precautionary detention order issued by the investigating judge of Foggia at the request of the prosecutor's office.
They live between Cerignola in the Foggiano area and San Ferdinando diPuglia in the Bat area.
The investigations were started in September 2022 by the Foggia traffic police section and the Puglia department and highlighted the organisation's modus operandi. After the acquisition of the vehicles of furtive origin, the vehicles would then have been taken to the site identified in the Cerignano countryside and would have been cannibalized by dividing the components by type and taking care to remove any element that could lead back to the vehicle of origin. The five - according to the investigators' reconstruction - would have transferred and abandoned the now bare carcasses of the stolen vehicles in the countryside a short distance from the dismantling sites, using agricultural vehicles to evade any checks by the police.
A method that would have affected dozens of vehicles, making those countryside a real car cemetery.
The criminal organization would have established a real distribution chain of the dissected components, also at a cross-border level. During the investigations, the police identified an articulated lorry of Polish nationality which, after being filled with stolen components, would have traveled to Poland where the same would have been reintroduced on the online used spare parts market. Power elements of hybrid vehicles were also found, the batteries of which would now constitute the new frontier of recycling due to their high cost. Twenty cars (including large brands such as BMW, Mercedes, Toyota, Volkswagen, Jeep, Hundai) identified and subjected to criminal seizure during the investigations for a total commercial value estimated at around 500,000 euros.
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