FLEET managers suffering from car thefts might think their vehicles are sold in a nearby city, or neighbouring region.

Not so, says global police agency Interpol – they could well end up on another continent. It recently co-ordinated controls of more than 8,000 vehicles in Africa’s Cameroon, Central African Republic and Chad, and found 14 had been stolen ‘mostly from Europe and Japan’. An Interpol spokesman said this underlined that member countries should contribute to Interpol’s database of stolen motor vehicles.

It currently contains more than 3.7 million records submitted by 106 member countries. In 2006, more than 2,800 vehicles per month were identified as stolen using the database.