Phone’s ‘find me’ app leads gardaí to bag thief

A thief who stole a handbag from a woman attending a conference did not realise the smart phone inside the bag was very smart indeed, and would lead gardaí to his car parked nearby.

A “find me” app on the woman’s iPhone helped lead gardaí to 37-year-old Ahmed Malik Iftikhar, a 37-year-old Pakistani national.

Iftikhar pleaded guilty at Galway District Court to stealing the lady’s handbag which contained an iPhone 5 worth €400; credit cards; and €50 in cash at while she was attending a conference at the the Galway Bay Hotel, Salthill, Galway, on March 27last.

Little did Iftikhar know that while he was sitting in his car at Upper Salthill a short time later with the stolen handbag, the tracking app on the phone was leading Garda Denise O’Halloran to him. Ifitkhar was captured on the hotel’s CCTV making off with the handbag.

Defence solicitor, Brian Gilmartin said the phone and other items were recovered within the hour and his client had brought €50 cash to court to give back to the woman. “It was the app on the phone that helped locate him,” he Mr Gilmartin said.

He said his client was a Pakistani national who had been in Ireland for almost seven years: “He’s an asylum-seeker, in receipt of €19 per week. He has a wife and children who are still in Pakistan. It was an opportunistic theft,” he added.

Judge Aeneas McCarthy imposed a two-month term, sentence for the theft, which he suspended for two years.