Car gangs target off-road vehicles

DESIGNER 'off road' vehicles have taken over from high performance models as the prime target for car thieves, a security conference was told yesterday.

The shift towards four-wheel- drive vehicles is partly due to insurance companies insisting on manufacturers fitting alarms and immobilisers on 'hot hatch' cars. The popularity of 4x4 models is booming and gangs are stealing them to order.

Police say the most commonly stolen include Land Rover's Discovery, Isuzu's Trooper, Suzuki's Santana and Samurai, Range Rovers, and Vauxhall's Frontera.

Research by Norwich Union, the insurance company, showed that the cost of providing cover for high performance vehicles such as the Volkswagen Golf GTi, Vauxhall Astra GTE and Ford Fiesta XR2i shot up in 1992 as they were increasingly targeted by criminals and joy riders.

However, after insurance companies insisted on improved security, the number of claims dropped dramatically.

Derek Plummer, marketing manager of Norwich Union General Insurance Group, told a conference on car crime held in London yesterday: 'The new generation of alarm/immobilisers appears to be having the effect of displacing (the) car thieves on to either less 'racy' cars or a whole new category of cars entirely. 'One area that is currently causing us concern is the 4x4 category of vehicles - this group as a whole are now showing many of the claims characteristics that we saw of the hot hatches in the early days of car boom.'

The conference, organised by the European Secure Vehicle Alliance and supported by RAC Insurance Services, heard from statistics published last month that 3.3 per cent of motorists in England and Wales had their cars stolen last year - the world's worst figures.

International criminals involved in car theft and counterfeiting are the new targets of Britain's national police intelligence agency, it was announced yesterday. The development follows the flood of forged documents across the country and the continued boom in vehicle crime.

The National Criminal Intelligence Service is particularly concerned with the growing availability of false passports, credit cards, benefit and cheque books and currency. It said the trade, worth 'billions of pounds', was operated by organised gangs.