Snowdrift helps catch jewelry robber

A huge snowdrift has helped the St. Petersburg police arrest a dangerous criminal who robbed a jewelry store.

Last Saturday the masked offender entered a jewelry shop on the city’s Engels Avenue and shot the guard twice, severely injuring the man, Interfax news agency reports.

He threatened the rest of the staff with his gun and ordered them to put the jewelry into a bag. Then the robber took one of saleswomen hostage and tried to escape by car.

“Two additional groups of security were immediately sent to the scene. Hot on the trace of the criminal, they found a BMW driven by a man born in 1981 stuck in the snow in the yard of an apartment block,” the press release issued by the St. Petersburg police stated.

The offender failed to put up any resistance, because he was “busy trying to pull the bag with the stolen things out of the car and only saw the police officers when it was too late.”

A TT semi-automatic pistol and a bag containing jewelry worth around 10 million roubles ($342.000) were found inside the vehicle.

Huge snowdrifts have become a real headache for the residents of St. Petersburg this winter as municipal services failed to cope with December’s heavy snowfalls, but it now appears that their sluggishness indirectly helped in fighting crime.