Romanian thieves are nabbed on raid at Tower of London
IT was an inauspicious place to carry out a crime.
But perhaps the Romanian thieves who chose to steal coins from the moat around the Tower of London were unaware of its bloody place in English history.
The four offenders had clambered over a barrier and jumped into the moat in front of Traitors’ Gate, through which many prisoners entered the castle – some of whom would not come out alive.
They scooped up £350 of coins thrown in by tourists and attempted to flee with their booty, but their raid was thwarted by a member of the public, who shouted at them and raised the alarm.
Tower of London staff and army personnel gave chase and managed to apprehend the looters.
The thieves were then arrested at the scene at 7pm on Saturday 31 January by police recruits on their first day on the job and charged with theft.
The gang – Ieronim Cancel, 24, Albert Pruteanu, 19, and Tarciziu Cancel and Istoc Ionut, both 22 – have now pleaded guilty to theft at Thames Magistrates’ Court. They were each given a six-month conditional discharge and ordered to pay victim surcharges of £16.
Police officers from Tower Hamlets returned to the scene of the crime on Friday to give the stolen money to the Royal British Legion after the thieves were sentenced.
Millions of tourists every year visit the notorious gate where prisoners such as Anne Boleyn, Sir Thomas More, Catherine Howard and Lady Jane Grey entered the Tower. Many visitors throw loose change into the moat, which can be covered by the Thames at high tide.
Yesterday PC Lee Juniper, from Limehouse Police Station, said: ‘It was a privilege to return the donated money to the Royal British Legion.
‘The officers who assisted in the arrest of the four men were new recruits, on their very first day out in Tower Hamlets.’
Britain has seen a huge increase in crime by Romanians in recent years. The Home Office published a detailed breakdown of the nationality of every criminal last year, showing that among the 128,000 Romanians living here, 361 were criminals.
Last year the head of Europol warned that travelling gangs of criminals from countries like Romania were using cheap flights and EU freedom of movement rules to launch ‘burglary blitzes’ in Britain and elsewhere.
The latest official figures show that just over 95,000 EU nationals were arrested by police in England and Wales in the year to the end of October 2014.
More than 30,000 of the arrests were in London. In the past five years 113 Romanian criminal suspects hiding out in Britain have been extradited under the controversial European Arrest Warrant.