Terrified farmers reveal Mafia-like traveller gangs hold them hostage, kill their dogs and batter their families so they can hijack their land
Date of alert:
Tuesday, 1 February 2022
Crime Ref:
Force:
Cambridgeshire Constabulary
It was a chilling set of calling cards, left at the side of a farmer's field in the bleak arable lands of Cambridgeshire. Ten brown hares, freshly-despatched, their bodies still warm.
The people who had killed them weren't interested in taking the animals home for the pot. They were making a ghoulish and none-too-subtle point to the landowner: they would be back.
This Mafia-like tactic is the latest face of a crime-wave sweeping the countryside, one in which hardened criminal gangs are trying to terrorise farmers into letting them pursue illegal hare-coursing on their land.
Police found the 10 hares on a road last month at Six Mile Bottom, close to the village of Boxworth in Cambridgeshire.
PC Tom Nuttall, who mounts regular patrols in the area with the local rural crime unit, told the Mail that such incidents are now common - earlier this year nine dead hares were found carefully spaced out on a road on the Hampshire/Wiltshire border.
