Gang targeting owners of transport vehicles arrested
Some of the phones recovered from seven highway robbery suspects arrested in Naivasha on Tuesday evening.
The gang targets unsuspecting lorry owners, commandeering the vehicles and driving them away.
Vehicles in the transportation business are their favourites.
They start by posing as customers, place a call to the owner and haggle over the price. They settle for high amounts of money, pretending to be in a hurry.
To cover their tracks, they gather enough information about their target so as not to raise any suspicions before executing robberies.
Several lorry owners have fallen prey to the dangerous criminals, who operate mostly in Nakuru County.
“The victims are mostly dumped in secluded areas and tied up inside forested places,” said the Naivasha sub-county Police Commander Samuel Waweru.
The thieves then sell the stolen vehicles in a neighbouring country, where some of them were recovered.
Acting on a tip-off, officers from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations arrested seven of the gang members in Maai Mahiu.
They were seized as they planned to strike again, unaware that detectives had been trailing them.
“We arrested all of the suspects from their common hideout after a tip-off,” Mr Waweru added.
The suspects were assisting police with investigations and more suspects are likely to be arrested, he said.
“They were the masterminds of vehicle theft. The thugs were not robbing victims at gunpoint, but their modus operandi involved luring vehicle owners on the pretext of ferrying high-valued goods,” he said.
He urged owners who have lost their vehicles to report at the Naivasha Police Station.
Mr Waweru said the arrest of the seven was a major breakthrough in the fight against carjacking, especially on the Naivasha-Nakuru and Maai Mahiu-Narok highways.
The arrests come barely a month after two suspects linked to highway robberies were apprehended.
They included the mastermind of several hijackings on the busy Naivasha-Nakuru route.
The two had hired a taxi to Nakuru before boarding a matatu and travelling all the way to Malaba on the Kenya-Uganda border.
“We suspect they wanted to cross the border but we were able to corner them. It is a big team but discreet investigations are in top gear. We are slowly dismantling the cartel,” Mr Waweru said at the time.
