Two burglars have been arrested in the United Kingdom after one of them accidentally dialed emergency services while they were committing the crime.
The men were arrested with the aid of the information gathered during the call which allowed officers to hear the crime in progress and ultimately listen in on their colleagues arresting the duo.
An officer in Staffordshire, central England, Chief Inspector John Owen described the thieves as the “world’s unluckiest burglars” and compared them to the ill-fated criminals in the movie “Home Alone.”
He disclosed that one of the pair mistakenly sat on his phone and rang 999 unknowingly, the UK’s emergency number.
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“I think we have just arrested the world’s unluckiest burglars,” Owen wrote on Twitter.
“Whilst committing a burglary one of the bungling burglars has accidentally sat on his phone & dialled 999. We (received) a call detailing all of their antics up to the point of hearing our patrols arrive to arrest them,” he wrote.
This is not the first time a set of robbers have mistakenly set themselves up. In 2013, a pair who were breaking into a car in Fresno, California, managed to call police on themselves.
The call handler on duty was able to track them down as Nathan Teklemariam and Carson Rinehart spent about half an hour discussing their plans. The pair were eventually arrested.
Also in 2016, two hapless robbers burst into a McDonald’s in France, only to discover that 11 armed members of an elite paramilitary force, who were wearing plain clothes, happened to be eating inside.
