Chinese police arrest a car thief in the toilet after he’d been on the run for two years.
Chinese police arrest a car thief in the toilet after he’d been on the run for two years.
A wanted fugitive walked into a police station to use the toilet thinking that no one would recognize him and was detained after the cops were alerted.
Li Mougeng, 35, was arrested at a police station in the city of Yichun, in the east Chinese province of Jiangxi, on Jan. 24.
The video showed the moment of the fugitive casually walks into the second floor of the police station and asks an officer if he could use the bathroom.
After pointing the way, the policeman froze for a while as he apparently recognized the man.
He immediately went to his colleagues, who confirmed that the man was a wanted fugitive.
Mougeng was met by four police officers, waiting for him outside the bathroom who blocked his way.
He was immediately identified and taken to the interrogation room where he was asked by police how he dared to enter the station after committing a crime, to which Mougeng answered that it had happened a long time ago, and he thought no one would remember.
The suspect was wanted for car theft and was listed online as a fugitive by the Wanzai police and had managed to escape since 2019.
Moungeng confessed to the theft and was detained.
According to reports, the most common crime committed in 2019 in China is theft. However, the number of theft cases decreased significantly from the previous years.
“In regions with higher population densities, there are also more theft and robbery crimes committed,” the report stated. “Even though some Chinese cities have the highest population densities in the world, the crime rate of these regions are still low when compared to global rates. Cities in China are also widely covered with closed-circuit television cameras, which have contributed positively to the reduction of crimes as well as to the crime detection rate.”
The total number of crimes in China increased steadily from around 2.2 million incidents in 1999 to nearly 7.2 million in 2015. Since 2015, the number of recorded crimes started to drop, most probably due to new protection and surveillance technologies, according to a statement by Statista. In relation to the population size of 1.4 billion people in China, the number of crimes committed is not very high compared to other countries.
“Theft and fraud are the most common crimes committed in China. In 2018, these two categories accounted for around 78 percent of all criminal incidents,” it said.
“Theft was also the crime that decreased most in recent years, while technological options for property protection and surveillance, in general, have improved significantly. The number of murders was relatively low at 7,525 cases, which was around 0.54 cases per 100,000 inhabitants.”
In 2019, around 1.09 million people were arrested in China, according to another report in Statista.
(Edited by Saptak Datta and Megha Virendra Choudhary)
