Online Reporter
You can’t Make This Up!
POLICE in Chegutu recently managed to bring to an end a one-man crime wave from a burglar who apparently treated residential areas in the town as his own personal shopping mall.
Meet Simbarashe Khotiwani, a 29-year-old whose criminal CV is starting to look more impressive than most people’s work portfolios.
Over the last three months, Mr Khotiwani has been clocking in for work with the punctuality of a civil servant — only that his office was someone else’s living room.
According to Detective Inspector Rachel Muteweri of the Zimbabwe Republic Police’s Criminal Investigations Department, the suspect’s “audit” of local homes ran from November last year right up to Friday last week.
In that time, he managed to accumulate 14 counts of unlawful entry. Fourteen! That is not a spree; that is a job.
His modus operandi appears to be the “smash, grab and don’t wake the dog” approach.
On November 22, he allegedly liberated a house of a laptop, R1 000, US$450 and a smartwatch. The residents reportedly slept through the entire transaction. Not one to rest on his laurels, by December 14, he was back at it, this time scooping US$850 and a fresh batch of laptops and cell phones. It seems he was doing his Christmas shopping early, albeit with someone else’s credit. The new year did not slow him down.
On January 28, he bagged a cool US$800 in cash from another house. By then, residents of Chegutu must have been wondering if they had accidentally left their doors open or if they were dealing with a ghost with a fondness for foreign currency. However, as is often the case in these matters, the ghost got greedy.
Last Friday, after helping himself to three laptops and some “other valuables”— the official police term for “stuff we have not listed yet” — Mr Khotiwani made a critical error in judgement. He decided to offload one of the stolen cellphones at a local shopping centre in Chegutu.
Apparently, the master of 14 heists thought that selling hot goods in broad daylight, right under the noses of the very people looking for him, was a sound business strategy. It was not.
Detectives, perhaps tipped off by a citizen who noticed that the phone on sale looked suspiciously like the one stolen from their neighbour’s house, swooped in. They did not just find a phone, but found a treasure trove, including, bizarrely, a welding machine.
One can only assume he was planning to weld his way into house number 15.
The detective inspector confirmed the haul: “He is now facing a total of 14 charges of unlawful entry and theft.”
So, there you have it.
A man who managed to break into 14 houses without raising an alarm was finally caught trying to sell a phone.
It just goes to show that in the game of cat and mouse, it is not the cat that gets you — it is probably another keen hunter on your trail.
