[Nulgath]

Indonesian thieves toss cash onto street to distract pursuers, one escapes, police ask public to return money

Stolen money isn’t any good to a thief if they get caught, so spending a part of their illegal earnings to ensure escape doesn’t seem like a bad idea. Two thieves in the Indonesian city of Palembang in South Sumatra made that calculation while literally on the run, and it actually worked, for one of them. The other one, not so much.

The incident took place yesterday at around 2pm. The thieves were staking out a bank in search of customers making large cash withdrawals (something many Indonesians do before the Eid holiday).

The thieves followed a 44-year-old man, Syah Budi, who had just withdrawn Rp 20 million ($1,500) in cash, out to his car. They then set up nails on the road to deflate the car’s tires. When Shah got out of the car to fix them, the thieves quickly took the cash from the car.

However, Budi’s son saw the theft and yelled at the pair. Budi realized what had happened and yelled at them too as they ran away.

As it was the middle of the day on a busy street, there was no shortage of onlookers to the crime. So the thieves panicked and tossed part of their purloined profits onto the ground to distract them.

As you can see from the video, quite a lot people stop to pick up the bills, but not everybody was distracted. As the camera pans down the street you can see a small mob of people surrounding the one thief who was unlucky enough to get caught. You see him take a few vicious blows from the crowd and the video ends with them surrounding him closely.

Police eventually apprehended the mob-caught criminal and later identified him as a 25-year-old named Nurdiansyah, who claimed that he turned to theft because he was desperate to make money before the Eid holiday.

And what about all of that street cash….

“The amount of money taken by the victim from the bank was Rp 20 million. We managed to secure more than Rp 9 million of that, while over Rp 10 million was taken by people passing by the incident,” said officer Hadi Wijaya of the Palembang Police on Wednesday night as quoted by Detik.

“We hope that people will have the good will to return the money, because, after all, it belongs to the victim of a crime,” Hadi added.

We’ll just have to wait to find out how many of those people will have the good will to return the stolen money.