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| Britain |
| Hijackers nab thousands of blank British passports |
| 2008-07-29 |
| Nice haul... LONDON (AFP) — Hijackers made off with boxes of blank British passports worth a fortune on the black market in a raid on a delivery van, police said Tuesday. Detectives said the 24 boxes of about 3,000 passports and visa documents, destined for British embassies around the world, were worth some 2.5 million pounds . The theft occurred when the van driver stopped to buy a newspaper in Oldham, north Manchester. The raider jumped in the van and assaulted a second delivery man in the passenger seat before speeding off onto an unmarked road. The robber then ran off, and when the second delivery man felt safe enough, he checked the van and found that several boxes had been stolen. If I'm a British cop, I'd be shoving a microscope up the driver and his backup's asses. "The actual value of the passports themselves is around 2.5 million pounds," said Detective Chief Inspector Bill McGreavy, adding that he had no significant information to suggest it was a targeted theft. "The commodity stolen is unusual. Whether the commodity was the intended items I don't know," he said. "The offenders in this incident have not taken all the items from the van. They've not cleared the van out." He said detectives were hunting at least two suspects. "The passenger has told us that both doors were opened simultaneously so I think there was a minimum of two offenders." The van was being forensically examined, he added. The passports were "very secure" as they contained a micro-chip which can be encrypted, he said. Nuthin to see here, right, Chief Inspector? Cabinet minister Harriet Harman, filling in while Prime Minister Gordon Brown is on holiday, called it a "serious crime". But the deputy leader of the governing Labour Party did not think it "necessarily shows a sloppy attitude". So...what kinda "attitude" does it show? Dominic Grieve, home affairs spokesman for the main opposition Conservative Party, branded it the "latest in a long line of security disasters to hit the government". In December last year, the government was forced to admit that two data discs containing personal details of some 25 million people were lost in the post. Top secret files on Al-Qaeda and Iraq were left on a train earlier this year, while hundreds of government laptops and memory sticks have been either lost or stolen in recent years. The passports were on route to the RAF Northolt air base in northwest London. A spokesman for the Foreign Office, which was responsible for the delivery, said: "The security vans we use have an array of security features." Yeah. Looks like they worked really well. |
| Posted by:tu3031 |
| #1 The next step is to bring in cops from Saudi Arabia, so they can have the perps Surrounded. |
| Posted by: Abdominal Snowman 2008-07-29 15:47 |