LAHORE - The lucrative business of tampered cars soars across the province due to the high prices of genuine vehicles in open market.
In black market, a latest model car with tampered engine and chasis number is available at its quarter price. Even if someone is caught with a tampered car, police help him get back the vehicle through “legal channels”; all done within a short span of time.
Police investigators and crime experts say many influential people buy and use tampered cars because of its very low price and poor police checking.
“When a car is stolen, thieves change the engine and chassis number of the vehicles with that of the damaged vehicles, and sell them in the black market,” a police investigator told The Nation.
According to the police officer, who preferred his name not be mentioned, once the engine and chasis numbers are tampered it becomes “a mission impossible” for the cops to trace the vehicle’s genuine owner.
Most of the vehicles stolen from the Punjab province are sent to the Khyber Pukhtunkhwa province where their engine and chassis numbers are changed. These vehicles are again sent back and sold out in the black market.
Insiders say the police officials help the accused get back a tampered car through the local courts after accepting bribe.
“The police have no proper record of all stolen and tampered cars. The investigation officer will not submit exact record of the unclaimed cars in the courts. Therefore, the judge will order the police to hand over the car to the man who was holding it when it was seized by police,” a police official said.
Several organised gangs are active in the booming business of auto-lifting in big cities of Punjab. Every year, more than 20,000 people are deprived of their vehicles either by thieves or robbers from across the province.
Police recover less than 10 percent of the total snatched or stolen vehicles while thousands of cases are declared as “untraceable” and disposed of after completion of legal formalities.
Auto-lifters are stealing cars with impunity from across the proving as police have witnessed a steep surge in the incidents of car-theft in recent years.
More than 45,000 vehicles were either stolen or snatched away at gunpoint from different districts of the province during the past two years. The provincial police had declared at least 18,000 cases of auto-lifting as untraceable in 2014, and 2015. Similarly, the provincial police had reported more than 27,000 cases of vehicle-theft in 2013.
The department, the same year, had declared as many as 12,000 cases as untraceable.
Most recently, police have seized hundreds of tampered cars since authorities reactivated the Anti-Vehicle Lifting Staff, a special wing of the Lahore police to deal with auto-lifting cases.
The city police completed restructuring of the AVLS two months ago. As part of its reorganisation, the AVLS officers were equipped with modern technology to track stolen cars, and hunt down organised gangs involved in the booming auto-lifting business.
The AVLS also arrested a young man who was specialised in tampering the chassis and engine number of stolen vehicles. He told the police that the members of his gang used to purchase the accident borne vehicles from the scrap-dealers. They would then use the chassis and engine number of that vehicle for the newly stolen vehicles.
Lahore CCPO Amin Wains has ordered the AVLS police to discourage the practice of keeping unclaimed properties in the police custody.
The city police sold out at least 80 cars in an auction last month as cops failed to trace the genuine owners of these vehicles. Now, they are planning another auction to get rid of old stock because of limited parking space in its large-size warehouse.
Last week, the CCPO told reporters that they were planning another auction for the unclaimed properties. The AVLS personnel were also in contact with forensic experts to determine the ownership of tempered vehicles, he said.
“In case, the police could not trace the owners, the unclaimed properties would be auctioned.”
Wains said that they were going to introduce some “drastic steps” to control auto-lifting in the provincial metropolis.
The field officers are ordered to revisit the police picketing strategy besides introducing an effective mechanism of monitoring and snap-checking at the entry and exit points of the metropolis. A high-tech operations room is also being set up at the AVLS Headquarters in Liberty Market to monitor working of the staff round-the-clock.