The Judiciary Police (PJ) arrested a man for breaking into a supermarket near Hotel Lisboa with a screwdriver – which he used to pry open the door and stealing 31,000 patacas from a cash register, PJ spokesman Ho Chan Nam said during a special press conference yesterday.
According to Ho, the suspect is a 37-year-old mainlander surnamed Li. He told the police that he works as a chef.
When a member of staff arrived for work in the supermarket 8 a.m. on July 29, he found that the door had been forced open. When he went inside, he discovered that 31,000 patacas was missing from the cash register and called the police. The police started to investigate the case by checking the supermarket’s CCTV and saw a man prying open the door of the supermarket at 3 a.m. on that day with a “hard object”. The suspect then left the supermarket after stealing some cash from one of the cash registers, and later the police discovered that Li had left Macau through the Lotus Bridge checkpoint in Cotai and therefore put him on the watch list.
Ho said that the suspect was caught by the police when he was re-entering Macau on Monday afternoon via the Barrier Gate checkpoint. Li was taken in for questioning, where he admitted to the crime and said that he had gambled away all his money in a casino in Zape. Therefore, he picked up a screwdriver from a construction site near the supermarket as he was walking in the area, and then pried open the supermarket’s door and stole some cash from a cash register.
Ho said that the police still needed to investigate if the suspect had used a screwdriver to pry open the door.
Judiciary Police (PJ) officers escort the hooded burglary suspect to a PJ vehicle outside the PJ headquarters in Zape yesterday. Photo: Dorothy Vong
