Vehicle track leads to hijacker's underwear

In an incident last night which perhaps underlines the ... reach of today's vehicle tracking technology, a Tracker recovery crew and members of the SAPS Gordon's Bay Dog Unit arrested four alleged hijackers in Cape Town after the keys of a hijacked vehicle as well as the victim's stolen credit cards were tracked down to the underwear of one of the suspects.

The incident occurred shortly after 17h00 last night (May 15, 2007) when a woman was attacked by four armed men as she arrived home in her luxury multi purpose vehicle in a private security complex in Lansdown.

She was immediately ordered out the car and stripped of her cellphone and credit cards.

"We then activated her Tracker and within 25 minutes found the vehicle parked in Belgravia. Another vehicle was parked nearby where the driver and his passenger were acting suspiciously 'underneath the dashboard'. The driver was then searched and both the hijacked vehicle's keys as well as the woman's credit cards were found stashed in his underpants," says Gareth Crocker, Tracker's Communications Manager.

The two men then led Tracker personnel and the SAPS to a house in Ottery where the pair's two other alleged accomplices were hiding. There they recovered the woman's cellphone as well as a plastic gun that was used in the hijacking.

"We've recovered vehicles and stolen merchandise from some pretty interesting places over the years, but I can't recall us ever having much success in people's underwear before," says Crocker. "We are extremely proud of both our own Tracker recovery crew as well as the SAPS's Gordon's Bay Dog Unit who had no less than five of their members involved in the incident. We firmly believe that Tracker's success as the continent's most prolific vehicle tracking company comes from the experience and expertise of our own operations personnel as well as the efforts of the SAPS. Incidentally, both crews were in action later that night at around 22h30 when they recovered a stolen van in Mitchell's Plain that had been taken earlier in the day from a train station in Strand."

In just over ten years, Tracker, with the help of the SAPS, has now tracked down more than 32 000 stolen and hijacked vehicles from underground basements, subterranean pits, the back of moving trucks, wrapped in tinfoil, painted in tribal muti and, now, a set of car keys and credit cards from a hijacker's underwear.