Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Thief with a heart

A thief in South Africa safely returned a seven-week-old baby he discovered in a car he had stolen, in a real-life incident that could have come out of the local Oscar-winning movie Tsotsi.

The man sped off in Olga Botha's car with baby son JP in the back seat after she had stepped out of the vehicle to open the gate to their Johannesburg home.

Ms Botha alerted the police, who reached the thief by phoning the cell phone that was inside her handbag in the car.

"The suspect answered the phone and said he had been waiting for a call so he could say where the baby could be found," police spokesman Paul Ramaloko said.

The man told the police that he would leave the baby at a primary school, where his parents later found him fast asleep in a classroom.

"A thief with half a heart," is how the Botha parents described the man.

South Africa scored an Oscar for best foreign film in March for Tsotsi, a story of a 16-year-old thug who finds a baby in the back seat of a car he hijacked.

After first taking care of the baby himself and becoming attached to him, he decides to take the baby back to his parents and face the wrath of the law.

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