In April a £50,000 Luxury Lexus 4x4 was stolen from a house in west London. This may not sound like a wholly unusual incident, but in this case the car was fitted with a state of the art tracking system.
The UK’s National Crime Agency started tracking the journey of the car, following it as it was taken from London to Le Havre, in north France, before being shipped all the way to Oman in the middle-east. It was then shipped on to Kenya and finally transported in a container to Kampala, the capital of Uganda.
Police worked with local Ugandan law officials and travelled to Kampala. When they arrived at the car's new location in Kempala they were stunned to find 26 other cars that had been stolen in the UK before being shipped to Uganda. The value of the vehicles tops £1 million.
Uganda, a former British colony, is one of the few countries in the world where cars are driven on the left-hand side of the road, which makes the British car models more attractive. The country is also landlocked, which makes importing vehicles than much more expensive.
The stolen cars found in Kampala are now in the process of being transported back to the UK.