Police in Yangon channeled their inner Sherlock Holmes this week by subjecting a thief to an X-ray and discovering $80 in his stomach.
The 30-year-old suspect’s downfall started on June 26 when he snatched a bag of cash from a 49-year-old woman on 18th and Anawratha Street, according to reports. The woman, who had medicine in the bag for a brother-in-law as well, called out for help.
Her shouts reached the taxi that the thief had hailed, probably hoping to escape into the anonymity of Yangon traffic. The taxi driver locked the doors, the Voice reported, and sometime around then the suspect started gobbling cash.
This blurry photo of the aftermath, which circulated on Facebook, shows police and passersby surrounding the man as he is arrested.
“The thief ran into the taxi but the driver heard that the woman was shouting then the thief swallowed all the money and he couldn’t speak,” an officer from the Lanmadaw police station was quoted as saying. “That’s why he was sent to the hospital.”
Police took him directly to Yangon General – where the woman was going anyway to deliver the medicine to a relative – found the swallowed stash via X-ray and charged the man with causing death, hurt or restraint in the commission of a theft, the Myanmar Times reported.
According to the Voice, there were different denominations of Myanmar kyats in the man’s stomach adding up to $80.
Please have pity on whoever is responsible for waiting for the cash to uh, you know, come out the other end.
Or as the prim and proper Times lovingly described what needed to occur before the retrieval of the funds: “the normal course of the digestive process.”
