Stolen French Mountain Bike’s 1,000-Mile Journey: From Colomiers to Morocco’s Black Market

An online complaint was filed with the Colomiers (Haute-Garonne) police station to shed light on this case. "This bike must have traveled with others to be resold in Morocco, but I have no formal proof," says Shazia, the mother of the family who is trying to understand how her 14-year-old son’s bike, stolen in France at the end of June, could have ended up in Morocco in such a short time.

The teenager parked his Transition brand camouflage green-purple mountain bike in the KFC parking lot in Colomiers on June 28 around 7 p.m. He did not find the mountain bike when he left the fast food restaurant. "My son used it to go to the forest and go for walks with friends. It was a bike we had bought after an ad on the Leboncoin website and we had paid 850 euros for it at the time," explains the mother, who "posted a post on a specialized Facebook group to alert and try to find it."

A few weeks later, an internet user contacts her to inform her that he has a bike identical to her son’s. The man, residing in Morocco, claims to have bought this bike for 500 euros, "in good faith," from a seller who would have acquired it at a market in Toulouse. He swears he did not know it was a stolen bike. The investigation is ongoing. "For now, we have no news. We had to buy a new bike in the meantime...," says Shazia.

Each year, 400,000 bicycles are stolen in France by criminal networks that resell them in Eastern European and Maghreb (Morocco or Algeria) countries. "These bikes stolen in large numbers in major cities are then hidden in vans waiting to be transported by carriers, in transit to Spain, then sold in Morocco to supply a parallel market," details a specialized source.