Vigilante operatives attached to Osuma Street, Inland town, Onitsha, Anambra state yesterday save a plasma television thief from being lynched or set ablaze by an irate mob who had already inflicted injuries on his face and head.
The incident occurred in the afternoon when the suspect broke into a residential flat and burgled the television, bed sheets and other household effects belonging to a tenant of the flat.
According to eyewitnesses, luck, however, ran against them when some neighbourhood caught him in possession of the stolen after scaling a fence and started beating him.
As he was being beaten up along Awka road, the crowd started surging to the point where a jungle justice would have been taken against him before a timely intervention of the vigilante operatives who quickly rescued and took him to their office.
As more crowd was surging towards the vigilante office, demanding that he should be set ablaze for having the temerity to come from Woliwo Area of Onitsha to burgle a house at Inland town, the vigilante operatives quickly invited the police from Inland Police Division who rushed to the scene with a Toyota Sienna bus and took him away to the station.
The owner of the flat whose plasma television and other household effects were burgled, equally joined the police vehicle to the police station before the mob dispersed in anger and disappointment.
Those who commented on the development said though it is not good to waste human blood through jungle justice, the suspect, a handsome fair complexioned young man was so foolish to have embarked on such a suicide mission.
The two police officers on mufti, a man and a woman could not mutter a word until they drove off with the suspect and owner of the burgled flat.
