10-year-old boy steals car to take friends on joyride

Photo: Karli Saul / SCANPIX

A 10-year-old boy who had stolen a car to take his friends, aged five and six, on a joyride was nabbed by the police in Estonia's second-largest city of Tartu the night into Wednesday.

The police received in the night a call from a girl who said she and her friends had stopped a car driven by a small boy. The Citroen vehicle caught their attention by erratic maneuvers. The patrol discovered on the scene that the driver was a boy aged no more than 10 years, accompanied by two friends. The same children had been reported missing about an hour before they were caught in Tartu.

«It also turned out that before going on the joyride the children had broken into an enclosed territory in the village of Lemmatsi where they first tried to start a vehicle but without success. After that they succeeded in starting a Volkswagen with which they had a slight mishap there and then. Thereafter the children went for a ride with the Citroen that stood in the yard with doors unlocked and the keys in the cabin,» a spokesperson for the South prefecture said.

Luckily nothing happened during the two-kilometer drive from Lemmatsi to Tartu and the children who were not aware of the dangers escaped unhurt. Police delivered the kids to their parents and notified the owners of the vehicles about what had happened. The case is now in the hands of the youth police.