The great mobile robbery

Thieves get away with 26,000 handsets...

Police have admitted that thieves stole 26,000 Samsung A300 mobile handsets last weekend from a warehouse in Hayes, Middlesex.

Siemens has deactivated the phones so that they cannot be used in the UK and is offering a £200,000 reward for their return.

The handsets have a high-street value of £4.2m.

A police spokesman said that there was no sign of forced entry at the warehouse and the removal of the phones would have taken either an articulated lorry, or a fleet of vans.

The news of the heist comes just weeks after the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir John Stevens launched a crackdown on mobile phone crime, and hours after details of a raid on security vans in which thieves got away with £4.75m from a secure zone in Heathrow airport.