The Carabinieri of the Provincial Command of Cremona conducted a significant activity to prevent and combat the theft of agricultural vehicles and related equipment, especially satellite GPS, of significant economic value, which ended with the arrest of a crime suspect for receiving stolen goods from a 46-year-old man .
On Thursday 13 June, around 03.40, a Carabinieri patrol was patrolling the countryside around Cremona when it noticed an articulated lorry heading towards an area where there are some warehouses. The soldiers, suspicious of the unusual presence of that type of heavy vehicle at that time of night and in such an isolated place, followed him at a safe distance, without making any lights known, to understand where he was headed. The march ended in the courtyard of a prefabricated building left in a state of abandonment, where the truck stopped. Here the Carabinieri proceeded to check the vehicle and its driver, also in light of the fact that the chain closing the sliding gate accessing the courtyard had been cut and a door of the shed was broken.
Once inside, the Carabinieri found three parked tractors, one of which with the engine and lights still on, all without license plates. By verifying the chassis numbers it was possible to trace the owner of the vehicles, identified as an agricultural entrepreneur from Cremona who, when contacted, rushed to reach the location, completely unaware of the theft suffered during the night. The man confirmed that he was the owner of the tractors and that he had used them until 8.30pm the previous day, before parking them in his company at the end of the work.
The entrepreneur then formalized the theft report and the military personnel verified that the 46-year-old truck driver had arrived on site to load the tractors in order to take them away. Most likely the driver of the truck was waited in the shed by other people, who had disappeared at the sight of the Carabinieri vehicle and the controls. The owner of the building was also found to be uninvolved in the matter, as also demonstrated by the damage to the protection measures resulting from undue access to the property and by other signs of a previous inspection carried out by the gang. The tractors, worth around 100,000 euros, were returned to the rightful owner and the 46-year-old, who was unable to provide any type of justification, was accompanied to the barracks to be arrested as a suspect of a crime for receiving stolen goods and subsequently associated at the Cremona prison, awaiting the validation hearing. The hearing, held this morning, ended with the validation of the act and the man’s release from prison. The investigation continues to identify any accomplices and trace the destination of the vehicles, probably the illegal foreign market.
The Carabinieri of the Provincial Command, constantly committed to combating this type of theft, which is particularly serious also because it significantly affects economic resources and the possibility of continuing an entrepreneurial activity, renew the invitation to report any element of suspicion detected by part of the farmers and breeders of the area, as already suggested to them during a campaign carried out with the “company to company” method by the Station Commanders, aimed at evaluating the forms of passive security of the companies and encouraging their connection to NUE112 to facilitate the timely intervention of the patrols present in the device at the time of the alarm.
