In a desperate bid to escape from the police, a thief jumped on and hung from electrical wires after stealing a mobile phone in Karachi’s Nazimabad locality on Friday. 

In the viral video, the man can be seen hanging from the wires for a considerable amount of time before the police caught the thief after several attempts.

A video shows the mobile snatcher jumping from a pillar beside a pedestrian bridge onto the wires with a large crowd gathered underneath to catch him.

The unidentified thief had snatched a mobile phone from a rider before fleeing. One of the recorded videos shows the rider with an injury on his arm.

The crowd urged the looter to get down as he hung from the wires next to the pillars.

The thief eventually let go and fell down on a large piece of cloth held by people to break his fall. 

Incidents of burglary and mobile phone snatching are on a rise in Karachi as the ongoing year, like the previous 2024, is turning out to be fatal for the residents of the port city in terms of rampant street crime incidents which have resulted in the death of as many as 19 people since January in the provincial capital.

Five people have been gunned down in the city in the last five days in the city, The News reported on Thursday.

The number of lives lost in street crime incidents during the first four days of Ramadan include 56-year-old Khan Muhammad, a grocery store owner, in Sachal and a citizen named Imran in Shah Latif Town, District Malir.

Meanwhile, a shopkeeper was killed on March 2 in Scheme 33.

Fatal street crimes are not a new phenomenon for Karachiites who witnessed more than 72,000 street crime incidents in the past year affecting as many as 1,503 people including women and children.

Meanwhile, 106 people including an army officer, a retired commando, police officials, engineers, security guards and women were killed by street criminals whereas another 300 were wounded.