Sixty minutes. That is how long it takes to completely dismantle a vehicle for the car-theft cartels of Lahore. Having a battery of skilled workers at their disposal makes this very easy and professional. The very first thing to do at the clandestine workshops at Bilal Ganj, of course, is to destroy the engine and chassis numbers to evade detection.
Another approach is to steal the vehicle, pass it on to Bilal Ganj middle-men who, after some tweaking, send the vehicles off to their associates in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, most notably in Mardan and Swabi.
As per police records, Lahore’s most vehicle-theft prone areas are Johar Town, Model Town, Gulberg, Iqbal Town, Defence Housing Authority, Muslim Town, Garden Town, Faisal Town, Islampura and Civil Lines. “It is almost a family business for some gangsters,” said a police office to Pakistan Today.
As per statistics obtained from police records, more than 3,856 cars were registered stolen from the Punjab last year. Out of these, 598 remained completely untraced. The current record for this year is 2,902 registrations.
The litany of complaints against police authorities is long, ranging from incompetence to downright collusion with the car thieves. Chief of the systemic problems is the lack of synchronisation between different police departments, which is very important, given the cross-provincial spread of these crime networks. This could be resolved through computerisation and integration of the databases. On the municipal front, a lack of legal car parking spaces is also another issue.
But the state itself is only one angle of the situation. Some responsibility also has to be borne by the owners themselves. For instance, even citizens with luxury vehicles don’t install tracking or anti-theft devices in their cars.
Going by brands, Toyota and Suzuki are remarkably popular choices for car theft. As opposed to Honda Motors, these popular manufacturers have not updated their vehicles with anti-car theft systems. Their “door open locks” are simple enough to be cracked by ordinary “key masters.” To compound matters further, a strength of these brands (easy availability of spare parts at relatively cheaper rates) becomes a weakness as that further makes them attractive targets.
It will take a multi-pronged, multi-sectoral approach to curb this menace, where different tiers and jurisdiction of the state, the corporate sector and the owners themselves have to step up.
