A handcart pusher was sentenced to six months in jail after he pleaded guilty of snatching a phone belonging to an AP officer attached to the Kariokor Chief’s Camp in Nairobi.
The court heard that the officer was walking while making a call along Racecourse Road when Mohamed Ali Hassan accosted him and grabbed his phone valued at Ksh 15,000.
The officer tried to chase the accused but he was too fast for him and the officer mobilized bodaboda riders to go after Mohamed.
In a bid to conceal the evidence, Mohamed is said to have stopped along Nairobi River and dropped the phone into the dirty water.
He was arrested but the phone was never retrieved.
“It is sad that one cannot confidently communicate with a phone without worrying of it being stolen, I then sentence you to six months imprisonment and one thief will be out of the streets,” the magistrate ruled after Mohamed pleaded guilty to the charges.
Racecourse Road has been labeled as a place with a high crime rate specifically phone snatchings.
This incident comes after another man in Tana River county was arrested for stealing an Occurrence Book (OB) from a police station.
The man identified as Nyaga had gone to report a case but did not find the officer on duty and decided to take the OB and report both his case and that of the absentee officers.
The police claimed the incident was out of self-righteous rage.
