Seven suspects are in custody, two more are wanted on Tuesday with European arrest warrants, according to information from Tuesday. A tenth suspect is at large. Five cars worth 380,000 euros were seized.
State police director Franz Popp said in a press conference that “a major blow against organized crime” had been achieved. The Polish gang was lifted in international cooperation. Popp also emphasized the cooperation with the judiciary. Proceedings for commercial serious theft through burglary as part of a criminal organization are pending, explained Leopold Bien, first public prosecutor in St. Pölten. The penalty is up to ten years. Two suspects have already been charged. The members of the gang came mostly from the Gdansk (Danzig) area in northern Poland, said Johann Götz, deputy head of the Lower Austria State Criminal Police Office.
The thefts were committed from early July to late October last year. The police reported 15 completed deeds and an attempt in the Lower Austrian districts of Tulln, St. Pölten-Land, Korneuburg, Baden and Mödling and in Vienna. The most recent arrest in the case was on Monday last week. Three stolen cars were secured in Austria, and another car was found in the Czech Republic and Poland. Apart from that, the gang was particularly interested in Mercedes, Porsche and BMW vehicles.
Keyless Go system
According to Götz, all cars stolen in Lower Austria were equipped with the keyless go system, had high horsepower and mostly had a market value of around 100,000 euros. The signal from the keys, which were mostly in the anterooms of the victims’ houses at the time of the theft, was intercepted with so-called radio link extenders and forwarded to the vehicles so that they could be unlocked and started using the start button. Radio link extenders are special electronic devices that cost up to 35,000 euros and, according to Götz, are only used to commit car thefts.
A priority action initiated by the investigators in the area close to the Czech border was successful. In the early morning hours of August 5 last year, the driver of a vehicle with Polish license plates was stopped in Laa ad Thaya (Mistelbach district), who turned out to be the gang’s driver ahead. He should scout the border for police checks. Two so-called jammers were found in the Polish citizen’s car. These transmitters are used to disrupt a possible location signal from stolen vehicles or to prevent the current location from being determined. According to the police, they cost several hundred to thousands of euros.
Also in the morning hours of August 5, in Kleinhaugsdorf (Hollabrunn district), the driver of a Porsche Cayenne with a Polish license plate ignored the stop signals from police officers and wanted to flee across the border, which was already in sight, to the Czech Republic. This was prevented by firing a shot at the rear tire. There was also a jammer in the vehicle stolen in Guntramsdorf (Mödling district). The Polish license plates were total fakes.
The driver was arrested as well as that of the vehicle in front of him in Laa ad Thaya. The two Polish citizens are in custody in Vienna.
Spectacular arrest
On the night of August 5, two other Mercedes and Land Rover vehicles were stolen in the Mödling district, not far from the scene of the Porsche theft. The second car was noticed by police officers during an international search in the Czech Republic. However, according to the investigators, the driver managed to escape “at a speed of well over 200 km/h on a wet road”. The Land Rover has not yet been found. The Mercedes, however, was secured a few days later in Poland and returned to Austria.
Things were spectacular in the early morning hours of September 14, after the owner in the Korneuburg district noticed that his Porsche Cayenne V8 had been stolen and reported it. The car, on which Polish license plates were now mounted, was discovered in the direction of Laa ad Thaya and a roadblock was set up in the border town with a patrol car. The driver of the stolen car hit the police car and drove away. The Porsche was ultimately secured in Neuruppersdorf (Mistelbach district). The Polish license plates were total fakes. The damage to the stolen vehicle was estimated at 24,000 euros, that of the company car at 6,500 euros. Nobody got hurt.
At the border to the Czech Republic, further priority actions were subsequently carried out involving officers from the Federal Criminal Police Office, the EKO Cobra, the flight operations center in Meidling, the State Criminal Police Offices of Lower Austria and Vienna, several service dog patrols and the local police stations. At the end of October, the investigators struck again.
On the 28th of the month, in the early hours of the morning, a Mercedes with a Polish citizen behind the wheel was stopped. The high-priced car had just been stolen in Tulln, and the settlement area had been scouted out the night before. The driver was arrested. A man who had “observed” the border with a car for police checks was stopped on Czech territory. He was handed over to the authorities of the neighboring country.
Three other suspects who were traveling in the Tulln area were also arrested. When her car was searched, a “state-of-the-art” radio link extender and several pairs of fake Polish license plates were found.
The four suspects arrested in this country that October night were taken to the St. Pölten prison by order of the public prosecutor’s office. The man arrested in the Czech Republic has now been extradited to Austria. He is also incarcerated in the state capital.
Source: Nachrichten
