Shropshire burglaries gang tracked by their sat navs, court told

The routes that a criminal gang took from Birmingham to burgle homes across Shropshire, Herefordshire and beyond were plotted by police who seized sat navs from five cars, a jury heard.

At Shrewsbury Crown Court yesterday police painstakingly went through scores of instances recorded on number plate recognition cameras on motorways when the cars left an area of Birmingham close to the M42/M5 in the middle of the night, returning in the small hours of the morning.

The jury members were also pointed to dates, times and places on the sat navs taken from the vehicles that pinpointed them travelling to scenes of burglaries on the nights they took place and also to cell site analysis linking mobile phones to the scenes of the crimes.

Grazvydas Kasarauskas, 34, Geidruis Batuis, 33, Tomas Juospaitis, 31, and Gytis Dambauskas, 30, all of no fixed abode, each deny conspiracy to burgle between July 28 and October 9 last year.

Break-ins took place at properties in Shrewsbury, Oswestry, Ludlow, Wem, Pant and Morda as well as North Wales, Cheshire, Hereford, Worcester, Derby and Rugby.

Miss Mary Loram, prosecuting, said in some instances the number plate recognition cameras and the sat navs in two cars, a red Ford Focus and a black Vauxhall Corsa, showed that at the same time they were travelling just 10 minutes apart in the middle of the night.

The jury were told of a trip on October 2, plotted on the in-car GPS system of the Focus, to a bungalow in Highfields in Shrewsbury.

Detective Constable Ben Docherty said burglars ransacked the house, opening boxes and turning out drawers.

"It was a particularly disturbing burglary. The lady was very elderly and very distressed because everything had been gone through. There was not a room left tidy in the house," he said.

Another instance recorded on the seized sat navs showed that on October 4 a car returned to the Sedgewick Close area of Shrewsbury at midnight, coinciding with a break-in there. It was close to where there had been three other burglaries previously, the court heard.

Officers also used CCTV cameras. Footage of a car wash in Birmingham showed the red Focus with Juospaitis and Batuis getting out of the car.

The movements of a Mercedes was also tracked. Miss Loram said that on July 30 police impounded the vehicle after it was found half on the pavement and half on the road in Congleton, Cheshire.

"It was the same night that Kasarauskas was stopped in Congleton and arrested on suspicious of going equipped for theft," she said.

"He had a rucksack with a flat bladed screwdriver inside and gloves found in the pocket of his trousers. A head torch was discovered in the Mercedes."

The trial continues.