At least 20 trucks believed to have been stolen by a criminal network associated with the mafia were shipped to Malta in 2011 but have since disappeared off the radar.
The heavy vehicles are thought to have been brought to Malta in 2011
According to the Italian police, who last week carried out a series of arrests in connection with the case, the trucks, worth a minimum of €200,000 each, were first leased and then reported stolen by a group of organised criminals associated with the infamous Calabrian mafia, the ’ndrangheta.
The heavy vehicles are believed to have been shipped outside Italy, 20 or so of them thought to have been landed in Malta, brought here onboard a vessel that left Rome’s Civitavecchia port in 2011.
In last week’s police operation, codenamed Ghost Track, the Italian Guardia di Finanza and the State police arrested eight people and issued citations to another 17 following raids across the country.
Two of those arrested are connected to Calabrian ’ndrangheta families. More than 70 trucks costing an estimated €2 million were stolen.
There seems to be no trace of the mammoth vehicles in Malta.
A spokesman for CGT-Caterpillar, the Milan-based company which owns and leases the trucks, said a representative had filed a complaint with the Malta police in September 2011 on suspicion that the vehicles had been brought here. However, he said they heard nothing from Malta since.
Questions sent to the Malta police in this respect remained unanswered at the time of writing.
Nonetheless, police sources said the investigation started immediately but did not go very far. Spot checks were made on sites suspected to be housing the vehicles but no trace of them was found.
“But these are not Vespas we are talking about,” the CGT-Caterpillar’s spokesman said, referring to the popular Italian scooter brand.
Some of the trucks believed to have been shipped to Malta are huge, earth-moving vehicles that cannot pass unnoticed, especially as they do not fit in a container and would have to be transported on an open trailer-truck.
The police sources said the issue was particularly significant to Malta because of the ’ndrangheta connection, known to be among the most ruthless of the criminal gangs associated with the south of Italy.
“If this was an experiment, where they were testing the waters to see whether Malta is a viable storage depot out of sight or, perhaps, a transit point for dealing in stolen vehicles to North Africa, then the concern is that such traffic will increase,” a police source said.
This sort of trade is not new to Europe but Malta is a new entrant to the list of recipients of stolen vehicles on this scale.
Italian police sources said European police networks had long established the flow of stolen vehicles to places like Romania, Ukraine and other Eastern European countries via land transport as well as places like Albania via sea.
“But Malta is a logistical novelty in this sense,” the source said.
mmicallef@timesofmalta.com