The 7,000-mile trip Britain's stolen cars are now taking... all the way to Uganda

The black Audi Q7 vanished when heavy snow covered Britain’s South-east, shortly before Christmas in 2010. Four-and-a-half years later it appeared again, in a parking lot in the outskirts of the Ugandan capital, Kampala. In a small village just outside Maidstone in Kent, Martin McSwiney, his wife and their four children were in their beds when noises woke the couple almost five years ago. “There was very bad snow and my driveway is quite steep, so one of the cars was struggling to get down it,” Mr McSwiney remembered. “I ran downstairs to find the front door open.”

Thieves had broken into the McSwineys’ home, stolen keys to the two family cars and driven off with both of them. An Audi A6 was recovered that night, but the second – the Audi Q7 – had gone. When British police found the Q7 while on the trail of a stolen Lexus in Kampala, officers also found Range Rovers, BMWs, Mercedes and even a Nissan Micra – all stolen from Britain.

British police and their East African partners seized stolen UK cars worth more than £1m in Uganda in June. The record haul reveals how organised criminal networks are stealing high-value British vehicles to order and shipping them overseas, an established supply line that police warn is getting worse.

“We began to see an increase in the number of cars being stolen last autumn,” Paul Stanfield, regional manager for east and southern Africa in the Intelligence and Operations Directorate of the UK’s National Crime Agency, told The Independent. “A conservative estimate of the total value of motor vehicles stolen across England and Wales in the first three months of 2015 is around £100m, although not all are exported.

“The route from London to Kampala has been there for several years but we’ve seen a spike more recently,” said Mr Stanfield, with the majority of thefts taking place in London and the south-east. The pathways out of the UK usually lead through the country’s container ports, such as Felixstowe and Southampton.

Stolen vehicles are often presented as “personal goods” on container manifests and sometimes covered up with items such as furniture. Mr Stanfield says that outside Britain there are “elements in customs” working with the gangs. “to help get the cars through”.

A multi-agency initiative targeting UK ports led to the seizure of another £1.2m worth of vehicles last September and more vehicles are being intercepted. Detective Constable Nathan Ricketts of the National Vehicle Crime Intelligence Service intercepts up to a dozen vehicles a month at Southampton.

“Of these around half have already been stolen and the rest are in the process of being stolen through fraudulent finance agreements,” he said. “Over the year as a whole, 80-85 per cent of the vehicles I’ve intercepted have been destined for East Africa.”

But, with on average 9,000 container movements per day at UK ports and just a handful of police officers focused on the problem, finding stolen vehicles in transit is difficult. Once they leave the country, they are harder to locate. The major haul in Uganda came only after police followed a high-tech tracking device on a Lexus RX450. The Lexus’ journey shows the complexity of the network and the complicity of some officials.

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