Seven held and 940 kilos of copper seized after an 18-month GNR investigation
The GNR's Gouveia criminal investigation unit arrested six men and a woman for stripping copper from overhead telecoms cables across four districts, in a trade police estimate earned them more than 80,000 euros.
This was not a smash-and-grab. It was a business, built patiently, one telecoms pole at a time.
The GNR’s criminal investigation unit in Gouveia arrested six men and a woman, aged between 26 and 55, on 5 August, on suspicion of aggravated theft and handling stolen goods. The investigation behind it had been running for roughly a year and a half, and the thefts spanned four districts: Gouveia, Mangualde, Viseu and Aveiro.
Police put the group’s takings at more than 80,000 euros, earned by cutting and reselling copper wire from the overhead telecoms network. Ten house searches and thirteen searches of vehicles and warehouses turned up 940 kilos of copper wire, seven vehicles, 6,000 euros in cash, gold valued at around 49,000 euros and 103 counterfeit garments. There was also a shotgun, a carbine, three machetes, ammunition and the tools used on the cables.
A judge in Gouveia remanded four of the seven in custody. The other three were released under identity and residence terms and barred from contacting the remaining defendants or any witness in the case, by any means at all.
Why copper is still worth the risk
Scrap metal pays, and it carries no serial number. Copper theft tracks the commodity price almost in step, which is why the GNR has been issuing the same warning about catalytic converters.
The damage is the part nobody prices in. Every cut run of cable takes phone lines and internet away from villages, sometimes for days, and the repair bill dwarfs whatever the scrapyard paid. Inland, where the overhead network still does all the work, it also means no way to call for help.
The arrests land in a run of unusually large seizures, among them the five tonnes of cocaine pulled from a container ship taken into Sines, and follow the same shape: a long, quiet investigation, and only then the arrests.
Photo: Elentir / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA)
