A ROMANIAN gang stole £3,200-worth of booze, make-up and pork scratchings in a trolley dash through Morrisons on Dorcan Way.

Police caught up with Sebastian Gechereanu as he drove back to London on the M4 an hour after the items were stolen from the Swindon supermarket.

Magistrates sentenced the 24-year-old Romanian to nine weeks imprisonment after he admitted theft. He must also pay a £122 victim surcharge.

The court heard Gechereanu had travelled from Hounslow, west London, on Wednesday.

He could be seen on store CCTV picking expensive bottles of liquor pointed out by an as yet unidentified member of the gang.

Prosecutor Kate Prince said: “The crown’s case is that Mr Gechereanu and four other individuals have entered into the Morrisons store in Swindon having travelled from Hounslow to commit this offence.

“They have selected items from the alcohol aisle and initially filled the trolley up to £2,500-worth of goods.

Mr Gechereanu and an unidentified male have left the store and placed that trolleyful of goods into a Volvo.

“They’ve then returned to the store, selected another trolley full of goods to the value of £600 and started to walk towards the exit with that trolley and have then abandoned the trolley and left the store.

“Mr Gechereanu has got into the passenger side of the Volvo vehicle. That vehicle was stopped just under an hour later on the M4.”

Appearing before magistrates wearing a Nike tracksuit, Gechereanu, of West Way, Hounslow, pleaded guilty in to theft from a shop.

Jonathan Lewis, defending, said his client had been in the UK for two months. He had come to the country to earn money to send home to his mother.

Gechereanu had started working in a car wash but quit when he found out they were employing him illegally.

The unemployed man had turned to crime as a way of sustaining himself. “He planned to sell the items to get money to pay for rent and, basically, subsist.”

Mr Lewis said Gechereanu was working under direction.“He’s hardly the conductor. It’s the unknown male who’s the conductor.

“He’s the gopher. He’s the one shown the bottles to take.”

The Romanian had no previous convictions to his name.