HUNDREDS of metres of sus- pected stolen phone cable has been seized during police raids on scrapyards across Bolton.

And as the raids were taking place, two men were jailed for their part in a copper piping theft from a comput- er shop which caused almost £50,000 worth of damage.

Police have revealed there are now more metal thefts than house bur- glaries in the borough.

Opportunist thieves and have stolen everything from brass door knockers to massive lengths of high voltage power cable to sell for scrap.

As part of Operation Alloy, officers will be vis- iting one scrapyard every week to check that every- thing is above board.

And three were visited in Bolton by police, the council, the Environment Agency and Virgin Media.

As well as visually assessing the goods, police used ultra violet lights to check if the metal was marked with smart water, a chemical which allows stolen goods to be easily traced.

Police seized £132kg of copper cable from J Doyle in Manchester Road, Westhoughton, after cable experts identified it as BT telecommunica- tions cable.

The cable, an estimated 1,000m suspected to be stolen from the phone company, would have made thieves about £170 but would have caused chaos for phone users, potentially leaving hundreds of customers disconnected. In some cases thieves cut through expensive fibre optic cable, which is discarded, just to get to the metal cable underneath.

Scrapyard manager Andrew Whitmore said: “We check everything that comes in, but this has obviously slipped through the net. I don’t know how.”

Another 7kg of BT cable, worth less than £6, was seized from S C Chadwick in Oakenbot- tom Road, Breightmet, along with a pair of crutches clearly marked “property of Fairfield Hospital, Bury”.

Boss Sean Chadwick said he was annoyed a virtually worthless piece of suspected stolen cable had made it into his yard. He said: “I encourage what the police do. We need to get rid of the rogues in the job.”

Police also searched P G Metals in Longson Street, Bolton, but did not seize anything.

Insp Wayne Readfern, who is leading Bolton police’s crackdown on metal thefts, said: “Once all this is finished, I’ll be meeting with the owners and managers to say it’s not worth their while dealing in little bits of metal from the likely can- didates.”

Metal thefts in Bolton, Wigan and Rochdale account for 42 per cent of all reported metal thefts in Greater Manchester.

In July, power cable thefts in Bolton made up more than a quarter of incidents across the whole of the North West.

Across Greater Man- chester 12 people were arrested during the raids, eight for possession or theft of metals and four others for being disquali- fied from driving, immi- gration issues, wanted for serious assault and theft of a motor vehicle.