Police have unearthed a large, organised racket in stolen cars that operates at the national level and arrested eight persons associated with it.

Acting on a tip-off, Shibpur police made the first arrests around a month ago, after two people tried to sell off a stolen Tata Qualis to the owner of a motor garage. The car belonged to an advocate in Bilaspur, Madhya Pradesh.

The officers, however, did not suspect that the two were part of a large gang, and handed them over to Madhya Pradesh police.

A few days later, Shibsankar Tiwari, 21, was picked up after an undercover operation. His accomplice Rajiv Mishra, 24, got away.

Mishra, a resident of Shibpur, had taken a Maruti Omni from a rental agency in Ranihati, under Panchla police station, in Howrah. He, along with Tiwari, took the car to Sonagachhi.

On the way back, Mishra forced the driver out of the car at gunpoint on Delhi Road, near Bally, a police officer said.

A couple of days later, Shibpur police station received information that Mishra was trying to sell the car. This time, the cops suspected that he could be part of an organised racket since he had been arrested a year earlier on the charge of stealing a motorcycle.

The officers of the police station decided to lay a trap for Mishra. One of them contacted him as a customer. A deal was struck and a spot on Bally High Road was decided as the rendezvous point.

The subsequent operation led to the arrest of Tiwari, but Mishra is still absconding.

Acting on leads provided by Tiwari, officers of the police station later arrested a resident of Konnagar, Subrata Sarkar, and three associates, following their attempts to sell two stolen Tata Sumos.

A few days later, Sukumar De, an important member of the racket, was arrested in Guptipara, Hooghly.

According to police, the racket is based in Asansol and Bihar and is probably headed by a single man. Its area of operation is primarily Howrah, Calcutta and North 24-Parganas. The stolen cars are kept in Asansol and Bihar and later sold in different parts of the country with fake documents and licence plates, police said.

?The racket is highly organised and is backed by wealthy and influential people. Large car insurance firms, most of them based in Calcutta, are in all likelihood linked with it. Some political leaders, too, are on the suspect list,? said a senior investigating officer.

?I?m afraid that most of the people we?ve arrested are small fry. We have only hit the tip of the iceberg,? he added.