By Our Online Team

10^th Oct 2011:

Audi Q7: Are such cars funding Kla drug deals?

A long and meticulous investigation conducted by Journalist Jonathan Green for British newspaper The Mail Online has revealed that high value top of the range four wheel drive vehicles are being “stolen on order” from Britain for Kampala’s top drug dealers, the rich, and the famous.  In his report, Journalist Jonathan Green says:

“…At 4.30pm on a clear spring afternoon, Shellie Rhodes, a lawyer and a young mother of two, was returning home in her Audi Q7.  She lived in the upmarket village of Church Langton in Leicestershire, a virtually crime-free area.  She had seen the silver Vauxhall Astra prowling her cul-de-sac, she realised later, but at the time was more focused on rushing home to feed her sons, Jacob, five, and Joseph, four.

As she parked the Audi and stepped out on the neat, semi-circular driveway, a man in a black ski mask galloped towards her from the idling Astra.  “…Give me the keys or you’ll get hurt”, he [the robber] screamed.  Shellie did as she was told.  “…Don’t call the police or we’ll come back and get you”, he [the robber] shouted as he jumped behind the wheel and peeled out of the driveway, his accomplice following on behind in the Astra.

Rhodes first went inside to check on the children then called the police. And – like many similarly desirable cars stolen from Britons in very similar circumstances – the Q7 began its long journey to a place quite unlike Church Langton: it was heading for Kampala, Uganda.

A few days after the Audi theft, Surrey fireman Paul Burton advertised his year-old BMW X5 on the Auto Trader website.  He wasn’t to know that a source in Africa was scouring the online classifieds looking for black BMW 4x4s, cars that are easy to sell in any one of a number of nearby countries”.

Nearly all the cars they target are black: the vogue for African gangsters and politicians alike. Thieves were dispatched to the address.  Two Pakistani men visited Burton’s home, while a third parked 500 yards away on a side street. They stole the car during a test drive, asking Burton to get out and investigate a rattle in the boot and steaming off down the road when he got out.

“…The car was uninsured”, says Burton.  “…I have a £48,000 loan to pay off, which is probably going to bankrupt me”. His and Shellie’s vehicles joined 16 other cars stolen from eight counties in the UK that month at Felixstowe docks. There, the thieves changed their number plates, then loaded them into containers bound for Africa.

Car thieves today are international syndicates who not only pay local toughs to burgle and hijack but also have the connections and expertise to dispatch their goods abroad for sale in countries like Zimbabwe or Uganda. Big trucks and 4x4s end up ferried to feed massive demand in any one of Africa’s numerous wars.

Detective Constable Vince Wise, a British police offer who works for the Association of Chief Police Officers’ Vehicle Crime Intelligence Service (AVCIS) said, “…the scale of vehicle crime is changing.  It used to be that criminals would nick an Austin with a coat hanger and take it for a joyride.  Now we’re seeing serious criminals stealing high-end cars, which are then exported to Africa, and used as a deposit in a drugs deal or for other organised crime”.

Once stolen from the UK, most of the vehicles are initially shipped to Durban or Port Elizabeth in South Africa.  There, they enter a complex web of corruption. The first stage is ‘ringing’ or changing the cars’ identity; the final stage involves handing vehicles to couriers who drive them out of South Africa to far flung places like Kampala-Uganda.

In South Africa, Detective Constable Vince Wise revealed that he had forged a partnership with the South Africa Hawks and it is they who intercepted the shipment of 18 stolen cars bound for Uganda.  One of the vehicles found there was the Audi Q7 stolen from UK Lawyer Shellie Rhodes.

Another 20 or so vehicles headed for Africa had been stopped by the British police in February this year.  END.  Please login to www.ugandacorrespondent.com every Monday to read our top stories and anytime mid-week for our news updates.