Two German teenagers in Berlin weren’t all that smart when they robbed another teenager.
The girls stole a 15 year olds shoes, money and mobile phone. I suppose they felt sorry for the girl though, because they ended up giving her their old mobile phone.
The two girls, both 17 years old, forgot that they old mobile contained photos of themselves smiling and striking poses.
Police were quick to publish the photos of the thieves online Tuesday in an effort to catch the girls. The girls ended up turning themselves in when their pictures appeared on the evening news.
“One girl was brought down by her father after he saw her on the television,” said police spokesman Frank Plewka. “Today the pictures were in the papers, so the father’s phone has been ringing all day, because everyone recognized them.”
Neither girl had ever been in trouble with the law before.
Objects made of metal are being stolen by people looking to cash in on the increase in raw metal prices. Church roofs, statues, drain covers and even tweezers have been stolen in the city of Paris.
Thefts of copper, aluminum, zinc and nickel were up 144 percent in France last year.
“We are witnessing a real pillage of companies’ assets,” Colonel Philippe Schneider, who heads a police division that specializes in countering such crime, told reporters.
“Everything can be stolen, everything can be sold — cables, drain covers, sculptures,” Schneider said. “We even had 300 kilograms of tweezers stolen.”
Other targets included plane doors, phone booth floors, car wheel rims, cemetery gates and a church roof made of zinc.
Copper, widely used in construction and industry, became a big target for thieves last year as prices of the metal doubled to $8,800 a tonne at one point due to booming Asia demand.
Schneider said stealing cable from a building site or hijacking trucks loaded with scrap metal could pay more than robbing a cash machine or a bank and was far less risky.
“Stealing 10 tonnes of copper is simple,” he said.
“Alongside the traditional petty thefts are methods typical of organized crime, such as … armed robberies, often by international networks.”
However, the number of incidents reported had dropped around 40 percent since October, partly due to a fall in prices and partly because of police efforts to break up organized gangs, he said.
World copper prices have tumbled over the past few months but remain around 20 percent higher than at the same time last year.
Schneider said thieves often sold metal to recycling companies. However, of the 2,500 to 3,000 recycling firms in France, a maximum of 100 were involved in metals trafficking.
A woman in Waterville, Maine claimed on November 10th that she suspected that someone had sabotaged her washing machine. She reported her suspicions to the police and officers went out to investigate. After a short investigation it was determined that an unbalanced load of laundry had cause the machine to shake. Now isn’t that a good use of police services?
This man had a little bit more reason to report a burglary to the police in Muncie Indiana on November 4th. He’d returned from the hospital on that day and he found that his 36 inch Samsung TV was missing. It had been replaced with an RCA TV that happened to be missing it’s power cord. Knick Nacks and other items had been placed around the new TV in an attempt to disguise the difference. Hmmm I bet his thieves will turn out to be someone he knows or someone that’s been in his house before.
On a recent Sunday night the Shreveport Police Department was notified of a strange robbery. The Robbery, occurring at 11:37 pm at an apartment on Lakeshore Drive, began with four or five men dressed in red clothing and wearing ski masks entering the apartment pointing guns. The masked robbers demanded that the people inside the apartment take off their shirts and pants. The thieves then put the clothing in a bag and fled.
No other items were reported as stolen. There weren’t any injuries either.
