Monday, March 14, 2005

 

Yoink!

As the Daily Yomiuri site has the nasty habit of removing its articles within a pretty short space of time, I'm just going to include the following in its entirety rather than giving the link. If the Yomiuri website weren't so crappy, I wouldn't be plagiarising its material in this fashion.

Anyway, I'm totally impressed with this guy.

SAITAMA--A man who stole 45 million yen from a bank in Yokozemachi, Saitama Prefecture, in an elaborate heist earlier this month, made good the last part of his escape plan by the unlikely method of hitchhiking, police said Friday.

The robbery started at 6:30 p.m. on March 3 when the robber carjacked a 37-year-old employee of the Yokoze branch of Musashino Bank. The following morning, at about 9 a.m., the robber forced the man to open the rear door of the bank, entered, and tied up the man and eight other employees.

After robbing the bank, the perpetrator drove off in in the bank manager's car to where the abducted employee's car had been parked, and changed cars. He then drove to a parking lot near the bank where he switched vehicles again, this time to a light truck.

After driving a few kilometers, the bank robber abandoned the truck and approached a 42-year-old man who had pulled over on National Highway Route 299 to use his cell phone.

The robber asked the man for a lift, saying he had had to leave his car at home because the roads were covered in snow and he did not have snow tires.

The man drove the hitchhiking heister 25 kilometers, dropping him off at Sakado Station on the Tobu Tojo Line in Sakado, in the prefecture. The robber gave the driver 5,000 yen in return for the ride.

The light truck the suspect drove was stolen in January in Sayama, in the prefecture, the police said.


Hitchhiking heister blazes new trail in ways to abscond
Yomiuri Shimbun, 13th March 2005

I'm wondering if the truck driver got to keep the 5,000 yen, or if he had to hand it over as evidence. Either way, I think a round of applause for the felon is in order; as a lont-time reader of Sherlock Holmes stories, I'm well aware of the risks of giving your crime a distinguishing feature:

"The more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes which are really puzzling, just as a commonplace face is the most difficult to identify."


Nevertheless, I hope that when I eventually get round to knocking over a bank I will be able to give some imaginative twist to my misdeed. Such as having posted my intention in advance on this page.

(In case you're wondering, it's going to be the Earlsdon High Street branch of HSBC, on Thursday, April 30th, 2009. I'll be wearing a hockey mask and a "Blur Are Shite" t-shirt.)

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Blur aren't shite!
 
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