The Daily Mail reports:
The plot of a Sherlock Holmes story was behind a jewellery raid in Russia, police believe.
Thieves paid a 74-year-old woman in St Petersburg to stay out of their flat – and broke through her walls to get in to a jeweller’s shop next door.
Although a burglar alarm went off twice security guards thought it was a false alarm because the doors were locked and the windows remained intact.
[…] The bizarre theft mirrors almost exactly the outlandish heist in the 120-year-old short story The Red-Headed League by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
In the story, shop owner Jabez Wilson is kept away from his premises after criminals give him a highly-paid job for a bogus company.
He lands the post because it was only open to males, like him, with red hair.
While he is working for the false business the criminals tunnel from his shop into the bank next door.
Although police in St Petersburg are still investigating the exact ruse used, they believe the Russian woman pensioner living next door to the jewellery shop was tricked in exactly the same way as the shopkeeper in the 1892 text.
Based on Conan Doyle’s story or merely a coincidental similarity of method? The latter ain’t much of a story is it so the former it must be.
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