Officers from the Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire Road Policing Unit have arrested an individual after stopping a van that was kitted out with equipment that effectively turned it into an illicit mobile petrol station.
The stop was made in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, and saw officers pull over a white Ford Transit van that had been “linked to fuel thefts” in the area. On inspection the vehicle was found to have a 1,000 litre tank, surrounded by a steel frame, in its back.
Poking out of the top of the tank was a pump nozzle, connected to an electric pump, itself with a hose running into a smaller tank, indicating that as well as being linked to fuel thefts, the vehicle was configured to dispense fuel. Such setups can be easily found online, where retailers sell kits containing self-sealing nozzles, electric pumps and connecting hoses.
A separate 200-litre blue drum was also discovered in the back of the van, as were at least two other smaller tanks.
The Transit stop is separate from a recent operation by Hertfordshire Constabulary that saw 12 suspected fuel thieves, 11 of whom are from the same two families, charged over alleged links to around 600 incidents reported by forecourts in Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire.
