Suspect stole handphone from office
ongoing pipe repair works beside my shop. The shops are connected and this made us concerned about our water supply too. The suspect took this opportunity to move around and steal a handphone from the office before fleeing,” he told theSun.
Zie, upon realising what had happened, quickly got in touch with his neighbour, who told him that the man had given the same story about doing pipeworks in his neighbour’s shop.
“This seems to be the guy’s modus operandi and he is a smooth-talking criminal. He is quite fluent in English and seemed like a local to me,” he said, adding that he subsequently lodged a police report at the Jalan Telawi police beat base in Bangsar.
Zie said he was shocked when he saw the photo of the suspect taken from CCTV footage released by police.
“The suspect was clad in the same blue T-shirt during the handphone theft that happened in my place.”
When contacted, Brickfields district police chief ACP Ruslan Khalid said a search has been launched for the suspect.
“I can’t rule out an inside job in the bank case because we have to get the suspect first so that we can establish what actually happened,” Ruslan said.
“On the handphone case, we will definitely look into it.”
Sources said the investigators had identified at least three similar cases with the same modus operandi and possibly involving the same suspect.
On Monday, theSun front-paged its report on the suspect who with only a piece of paper walked into a bank and left undetected with RM600,000 that he stole from a safe room.
Posing as a fire extinguisher maintenance staff, the thief, who carried a backpack and wore a T-shirt, Bermuda shorts and slippers, was in and out of the bank with the money in just 20 minutes.
He entered the bank at about 12.30pm and identified himself to staff as a technician of a fire extinguisher company appointed to inspect the fire extinguishers.
After showing the staff a document that was supposedly the floor plan of the place, the bank manager met the man and asked him for identification.
When he could not produce any, the bank manager asked him to leave.
However, after the bank manager left for lunch, the suspect, who remained at the premises launched his daring theft.
He pretended to check the extinguishers and moved to the vault, which was accessible only to the bank manager and the chief cashier via a personal access code.
When the cashier walked into the vault, the thief placed an object on the auto-lock latch of the door, disabling it.
Minutes after the cashier walked out, the man walked into the vault and coolly helped himself to wads of cash, that he stuffed into the backpack he was carrying.
He then casually walked out of the bank.