A man in Nanjing has found himself detained at the authorities’ pleasure after choosing to vent his anger by shooting out the rear windscreen of a car parked by the roadside with that favourite toy of boys around the world, the slingshot.
When Mr. Liu in Nanjing set off to drive to work one recent morning, he was met at his car by a surprise. The vehicle’s rear windscreen had been smashed.
Liu quickly called the police, having judged that the window of his vehicle parked outside at the roadside had been broken by steel pellets.
After several days of tracking by means of precision observation of surveillance cameras, police were able to identify the the suspect and make a subsequent arrest.
It transpired that the man had been out hunting birds with the slingshot, also known to many in other parts of the world as simply a catapult.
But the detainee failed to bag a single one. Angered at his lousy aim, he decided revenge was in order, on the nearest inanimate object that so happened to be Liu‘s parked car.
The man then committed one more crime of vandalism, breaking the badge off another car in the vicinity. Police are at present considering over what charges to bring against the man in light of his actions, reports The Paper.
It’s far from the first time that slingshots have been used in China to commit crimes. With firearms virtually impossible to come by, the slingshot makes for a handy alternative, capable in many cases of inflicting much the same damage or injury.
In June of 2018, in a Shaanxi Province village near the capital of Xi’an, the windows of no less than seven homes were smashed by a man who was said to be “playing” with a slingshot and metal pellets up to 8 millimetres in diameter.
The man, surnamed Wang, was arrested for disorderly behaviour, reported the South China Morning Post at the time.
Nearer to home, in Shanghai, in February of 2017, a man shot a catapult at a surveillance camera, breaking its protective glass cover, reported Newsflare.
A passenger in the front seat of a blue minivan, local reports suggested that the man, surnamed Li, fired the slingshot after becoming impatient at waiting for the traffic lights to turn green.
