Bungling Brit police eat crime scene evidence
By ANIThursday, December 2, 2010
LONDON - Police officers at a crime scene in Britain are said to have eaten Domino’s pizza without realising that they had been ordered by the very suspects they had been hunting.
The Old Bailey heard that the officers bought the two deep pan pizzas at a reduced price from a delivery boy after the gang who ordered them refused to answer the door.
The gang had ordered the food from a Hertfordshire house where they were holding a drug dealer hostage in April.
As the victim, who was bound to a chair, was beaten and battered across the face with frying pans, the gang ordered a Domino’s pizza.
But before the food arrived the victim escaped through a window and raised the alarm at a nearby building site.
Police arrived to find the delivery boy and then “ate the evidence” outside the house.
The following day another officer found the boxes in the boot of the police car.
“The address was written on the pizza box, together with the time, 5.13pm, and a mobile telephone number,” the Daily Mail quoted prosecutor Sally Meaking-McLeod as saying.
The empty boxes were seized and produced in court as an exhibit for the jury to examine.
“Because the pizza delivery man could not deliver the pizzas, the police who were at the scene did not realise the significant potential of this evidence so they offered to buy the pizzas at a reduced rate for themselves and ate them, putting the boxes in the back of a police car,” Meaking-McLeod said.
“It was only subsequently that the pizza boxes were found in the back of a police car and a phone number was found on one of them and it came to light that the officers had eaten the evidence,” she stated.
The trial continues. (ANI)