KANAGAWA (TR) – To be filed under: biking bad.
Kanagawa Prefectural Police have arrested a man who pedaled a stolen bicycle over 1,000 kilometers from Kumamoto Prefecture to the town of Hakone, Kanagawa.
On Tuesday, a police officer stopped the man, 53, after seeing him pushing the mamachari cycle up a hill in the resort town, reports the Kanagawa Shimbun (Aug. 11).
During voluntary questioning, he admitted to the theft. “Since I am from a remote island and had never been to the capital, I wanted to go see it,” the suspect was quoted by the Odawara Police Station.
Umbrella as giveaway
The journey began on foot in Kagoshima Prefecture, where the man is from. On May 24, he allegedly stole the single-gear bicycle — valued at around 10,000 — from the garage of a 25-year-old male agricultural trainee in Tamana City in neighboring Kumamoto.
“It got difficult for my feet,” the man later told police in explaining the reason for the theft.
Police assumed he used the undersea tunnel spanning the Kanmon Straits between Fukuoka and Yamaguchi prefectures, meaning the journey covered 1,065 kilometers.
The officer in Hakone decided to begin questioning him on a voluntary basis after finding it suspicious that he would have an umbrella in his possession on a clear day in which the temperature was hovering around 35 degrees Celsius.
