Pulled out of traffic

Top investigator “smelled” car thieves after the border

The highway is his territory, tracking down criminals his vocation - Reinhold Wiedergut had the right nose again.

(Bild: Klaus Loibnegger)

Wrong time, wrong place: If the car thieves had known that Carinthia's No. 1 sniffer was on duty, they probably wouldn't have entered the country via Arnoldstein.

Too bad: Without suspecting anything bad, the two Bulgarian drivers entered Austria from Italy on Mother's Day and stopped at the border in the morning to buy vignettes. What they couldn't have known was that they were already in the sights of Reinhold Wiedergut, the top investigator of the Villach highway police.

Shortly after the Arnoldstein border, the two Bulgarian car thieves came to an end.

(Bild: Uta Rojsek-Wiedergut)

"A rust bucket with Italian license plates and a new Audi A4 with Bulgarian plates. I smelled something fishy - and told my colleagues that we had to take a look," said the criminalist in the "Krone" interview. And, as usual, the man from Villach was proved right. The investigator took a very close look at the papers - and scored a hit! "The old car was 'clean', but the registration certificate for the A4 was forged. The chassis number didn't match the paperwork."

Access before the victim noticed the theft
And so the handcuffs clicked for the two suspects on the spot. Even if initially "only" for forgery. "Our first search in the search system didn't produce any hits. But there was one during the interrogation. At the same time, the owner of the stolen car filed a complaint with the police in Bergamo. She had only noticed the theft shortly beforehand."

From then on, the suspects were no longer so relaxed. "At first, they usually act as if nothing could happen to them. And I'm sure they've got more on their plates. We discovered high-tech devices in the accomplice's car that can be used to intercept radio signals and produce duplicate keys."