Trapped thief drops trousers in bungled burglary

He wiggled, jiggled and even dropped his trousers, but a thief trying to break into a supermarket in Portugal stayed stuck fast in a tiny window until he was rescued by police and the fire brigade.

"Apparently he dropped his trousers as he was trying to free himself by wiggling," Capt. Santos, local police chief in Loule in southern Portugal, told Reuters on Monday.

He said the slim 22-year-old Romanian man had spent about 11 hours stuck in the window, including the two hours it took police and the fire brigade to get him out on Sunday morning.

"Once he got his upper body inside, there was nothing there to find support on, so he was stuck at his waist ... It's not uncommon for thieves to get inside and then not be able to get out after a burglary, but this was quite unusual," Santos said.

Shock horror for would-be power cable thief

Police in central England are hunting for a badly scorched would-be copper power cable thief after finding a hacksaw embedded in an 11,000 volt power cable Saturday night.

The thief, who also left a lit blow torch at the scene, is expected to be badly charred, spiky haired and not exactly the brightest bulb in the socket.

"The sheer stupidity of cutting through power cables should be glaringly obvious to everyone," said Phil Wilson, customer operations manager with local power company Central Networks.

"At the very least putting the hacksaw through the cable would have created an almighty bang and the line would have burned for quite a few seconds, showering them with molten copper... We can only assume they left in a great hurry or they were injured and were dragged away by an accomplice." But searches of local hospitals have so far not found the culprit, a spokeswoman for Derbyshire Police said Tuesday.

"Maybe they had a lucky escape," she said. "We don't have any leads yet."

Nearly 800 customers in the village of Creswell were cut off when the wannabe copper thief sawed into their power supply on Saturday night, but Central Networks got the lights back on within a few hours.

Copper prices have more than doubled in the last four years as China has gobbled up huge quantities of it, sparking a wave of copper thefts across the globe from South Africa and the United States to Italy and Britain.

Thieves targeting power lines and electricity substations have already led to two fatalities in Britain and many serious injuries, while leaving thousands without power.