Police bust tractor trafficking network

French police have swooped on a gang caught stealing expensive tractors from car dealers across France before selling them off in Romania.

Published: 20 July 2012 10:23 CEST

Noisy, bulky and instantly recognizable, a tractor may seem a difficult object to steal. But a gang operating in France managed to steal around 50 of the vehicles, worth €5 million ($6.1 million), Le Figaro reports.

The thieves have been targeting isolated car dealers in the countryside since late 2010, police said. Striking at night, the farming machinery bandits broke into a series of padlocked car parks, stealing brand-new tractors and driving them onto a covered articulated truck before setting off.

Police investigators identified more than 25 raids on French car dealers.

The tractors, each worth between €70,000 and €300,000, were moved through Germany, Austria and Hungary, before they were sold in Romania.

"We were facing a very organized criminal operation," chief investigator Jean-Philippe Reiland told Le Figaro. "Investigations are still ongoing with local authorities."

On July 15th, four gang members were caught in the act and detained by the police. They were driving down a road in Brittany with three large tractors they had stolen in the town of Le Rheu, near Rennes.

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Police intervened as dozens of students gathered on a central Paris campus of the prestigious Sciences Po university on Wednesday evening, management said.

“After discussions with management, most of them agreed to leave the premises,” university officials said in a statement to AFP, saying the protest was adding to “tensions” at the university.

But “a small group of students” refused to leave and “it was decided that the police would evacuate the site,” the statement added.

Sciences Po said it regretted that “numerous attempts” to have the students leave the premises peacefully had led nowhere.

According to the police préfecture, students had set up around 10 tents.

When members of law enforcement arrived, “50 students left on their own, 70 were evacuated calmly from 0.20am” and the police “left at 1.30am, with no incidents to report,” the police said.

The protesters demanded that Sciences Po “cut its ties with universities and companies that are complicit in the genocide in Gaza” and “end the repression of pro-Palestinian voices on campus,” according to witnesses.

The protest was organised by the Palestine Committee of Sciences Po.

In a statement on Thursday, the group said its activists had been “carried out of the school by more than fifty members of the security forces,” adding that “around a hundred” police officers were “also waiting for them outside”.

Sciences Po management “stubbornly refuses to engage in genuine dialogue,” the group said.

The organisers have called for “a clear condemnation of Israel’s actions by Sciences Po” and a commemorative event “in memory of the innocent people killed by Israel,” among other demands.

Separately, the Student Union of Sciences Po Paris said the decision by university officials to call in the police was “both shocking and deeply worrying” and reflected “an unprecedented authoritarian turn”.

Many top US universities have been rocked by protests in recent weeks, with some students furious over the Israel-Hamas war and ensuing humanitarian crisis in the besieged Palestinian territory of Gaza.

France is home to the world’s largest Jewish population after Israel and the United States, as well as Europe’s biggest Muslim community.

The war in Gaza began with an unprecedented attack by Palestinian militant group Hamas on Israel on October 7th that resulted in the deaths of around 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

In retaliation, Israel launched a military offensive that has killed at least 34,305 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.