A gang responsible for exporting almost half of the mobile phones stolen on Britain's streets has been dismantled in an extraordinary sting operation.
Scotland Yard's commissioner hailed the series of raids as the 'biggest counter-phone theft operation in the world.'
Roughly 300 officers smashed into 28 homes across London simultaneously in the dead of night to arrest groups of pickpockets and robbers behind an epidemic of snatch thefts.
Two days previously, two Afghan gang leaders thought to be responsible for shipping 40,000 stolen devices to China and Hong Kong were dragged from their car and arrested in north London.
The two men, codenamed Heron and Seagull, are at the head of a gang responsible for fuelling Britain's £70million-a-year phone theft epidemic and were caught with a bundle of devices wrapped in foil to block their tracking signal, police chiefs said.
