Plant owners a celebrating following the successful retrieval in Sharjah of a JCB skid-steer loader stolen from the UK which had been fitted with a satellite tracking device.
After the alarm had been raised about the machine’s theft, by following the satellite reports from the tracking devices in the stolen skid-steer loader, it was found that the machine left the country from Southampton docks nine days after it was stolen. Enigma, who provide the tracking service, contacted Southampton docks to get the timetable and schedule of all the ships sailing out of Southampton on the same date the skid-steer departed from the UK and found the ship on which the machine was transported was the Socol 2 bound for Gibraltar. The machine was subsequently carried across the Mediterranean Sea and down the Suez Canal to Oman, where it was unloaded.
Through further tracking, Enigma was able to pinpoint the new location of the machine in the neighbouring UAE state of Sharjah. Working alongside Enigma’s joint venture partner based in Dubai, they were able to arrange for an undercover representative to visit the location in Sharjah who found the machine and the people holding it. To ensure the skid-steer loader was not sold on, the firm arranged for a deposit to be paid to hold the machine in place, while Interpol working between England and Sharjah completed the necessary paper work to recover the machine.
Eleven days after the initial theft in England, Ian Keam-George, Chief Executive of Enigma Vehicle Systems, arrived in Dubai with DataTag scanning equipment to aid in the identification of the equipment. Three days later, the Sharjah police took two suspects into custody together with not only the skid-steer loader, but also a generator stolen from another plant hire company in the Manchester area.
Andy Wortley, IT Director at A-Plant, said: “Enigma has been very flexible in the way they have developed the system with us. The ability to track stolen machines abroad is a standard feature of the systems developed by Enigma and the recovery of the skid-steer loader after a trip of well over a thousand miles to the Indian Ocean is a brilliant display of the powers offered by A-Trak.”