A ROMANIAN gang has admitted a £120,000, three month campaign of stealing copper cabling in the Ribble Valley.

Alexandru Codrut Tudor, 21, Mahai Georgian Antonala, 28, Alexandru Beligan, 28, Marius Avaram, 48, and Gabriel Predusca, 24, all from the West Midlands area, have all admitted conspiracy to steal. They are now facing jail.

Burnley Crown Court was told how they struck a total of 14 times between March and July last year, at rural sites in Clitheroe, Ribchester, Sabden, Dinckley, Hurst Green and Whalley.

Their targets included sub-stations, farms and a United Utilities waste water treatment plant. The cabling itself was worth £28,000 and the cost of restoring it was £90,000.

The gang, who had planned, and were prepared for the stealing expeditions, caused an electrical flash when they were trying to steal cable from Chipping Road, Clitheroe, and left empty-handed.

They were caught and arrested in the early hours of July 3 last year, within hours of taking cables from Dinckley and Sabden, when they were stopped in a convoy of two vehicles travelling south on the M6 at Staffordshire.

In the lead car were four of the defendants with ‘incriminating’ documentation, addresses and postcodes of sites in East Lancashire where cables had been stolen. In the following van was a haul of copper.

Mark Lamberty, prosecuting, said at 3.30am, on May 22, a witness whose home overlooked a car park in the centre of Ribchester awoke, saw a small van in the car park, got his binoculars and noted the number. On that night, cable had been stolen from Gallows Lane, near the centre.

On July 3, a three-year- old boy in Dinckley woke his young mother at 2.30am, upset his bedroom light had gone out. That night there were two thefts of cable from the area.

The men were remanded in custody, where they have now been for nine-and-a-half months, and will be sentenced at Preston Crown Court on May 8.