WATCH: Pleading For More Information, Birkirkara Shop Owner Shares CCTV Footage Of Late-Night Robbery
At about 11pm last Wednesday, Charlot Azzopardi was woken up by the sound of his Birkirkara shop’s alarm blaring from across the street.
In the couple of minutes it took from the alarm being set off to him arriving on scene, however, two hooded men had managed to enter the store, make their way to the inner office, and run off with some stolen goods.
A couple of hours later, frustrated and eager for answers, Charlot shared CCTV footage of the robbery on Facebook, amassing over 7,000 views and nearly 200 shares in mere hours.
“Insibhom jien illejla”
As it turns out, the shared footage – which lasts just a minute and a half – only documents the final moments of the mysterious men’s crimes.
“They had been wrestling with the main shutter for a whole half an hour,” Azzopardi tells Lovin Malta. “The shop is on a main road, and they were stopping every single time a car passed by.”
After managing to get the shutter open, the robbers had a second, glass door to tackle, and it was after they opened this door that the alarm was set off.
“The alarm rang 20 seconds after they walked in, and I was there two minutes later,” Azzopardi recounts. “They couldn’t have been in there for more than a minute and a half.”
In and out in less than two minutes... but the damage had been done.
“They initially walked all the way into the office at the very end of the store,” Azzopardi explained. “So when the alarm rang, they must’ve panicked because they had a lot of distance to cover to escape.”
The hooded robbers ran off with a packet of SIM cards, with Charlot trying to confirm whether anything else was also taken in the short time they were in his store.
Dozens of people have taken to the video’s comments to offer their own two cents on the issue, suggesting anything from fingerprint testing (the robbers didn’t seem to have been wearing gloves) to asking whether any other CCTV cameras were online around the street.
The case has been reported to the Birkirkara Local Council and the police, who are investigating the case. Meanwhile, Charlot Azzopardi is asking anyway who might have any information on the robbers to either contact him or the Birkirkara Police Station themselves.
“It wasn’t even worth all the damage they caused us,” he laments.
At one point, one of the hooded figures can be seen a little more clearly.
Share this post and let’s help Charlot identify the robbers’ identity.
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