TOKYO (TR) – Tokyo Metropolitan Police are hunting a suspect who brazenly walked out of a third-floor watch boutique inside a shopping area in Nakano Ward with an expensive watch on Thursday, reports TV Asahi (Oct. 30).
At around 8:00 p.m., the man entered the store in Nakano Broadway disguised as a customer and requested to try on a Audemars Piguet timepiece. The moment it was clasped to his left wrist, he bolted, according to police. From the time he walked in to the moment he fled, just eight minutes had elapsed.
The stolen item is worth an estimated 46 million yen.
Witnesses described a man clad entirely in black sprinting through the complex and disappearing from the third floor down toward the basement. “He was dressed in black, just whoosh, gone, and I thought, what on earth,” one bystander told reporters. “By the time I went past the store, there must have been about 20 police officers swarming the place.”
Tokyo police said the suspect is approximately 180 centimeters tall and was wearing a black jacket, black trousers, and a camouflage-pattern cap at the time of the theft. He was last seen fleeing in a northerly direction. He remains at large.
The brazen heist is the second to rock Nakano Broadway in a matter of months. In August, four luxury watches valued at a combined 200 million were stolen from a first-floor store in the same complex. Two Chilean nationals were arrested in connection with that case.
The five-floor shopping complex, which runs from basement level one to the fourth floor, has now suffered watch thefts on two separate floors. Security at the venue, long celebrated as a haven for subculture and collectibles, has been thrust into the spotlight. Police said the investigation is ongoing.
