Thursday, February 26, 2009

German Boy Arrested Over A Penny

A student is facing legal charges for ’stealing electricity’ worth less than $0.01 at a train station in Germany.23-year-old Jan Michael Ihl plugged his laptop into a socket at an abandoned stand inside the train station. He was going to look up the address of a hostel in Kassel where he was staying at.
As he got out of the train station three police officers stopped and arrested him for “illegally extracting electricity”.
The three police officers had been observing Jan Michael as he was crouching near the plug socket and said he was very nervous and constantly checking if anyone saw him doing ‘it’.
It will later be decided by the public prosecutors if this case will ever come before a court. I wouldn’t count on it.
Jan Michael, an energy specialist for environmental organisation Greenpeace later did his own calculations to find out how much electricity he ’stole’. He said: “The whole thing is ridiculous. I ’stole’ electricity worth less than one cent.”

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1 comments:

Lily said...

Well, I don't know, if this would really be just about stealing electricity...
There are two things, you must know: being a greenpeace-member means that some people may still think of you as being terrorists (happened to me!) and also in germany basically everything is forbidden, unless it's specifically allowed!!! So often, the german rules are not really about the offence as such, but just about holding everybody down and getting them to obey. grrrr!
But then again, every country has got it's own special attempts of suppressing. The germans are just completely open about it.l in briotain f.ex. it's all so very nice and politely disguised, they just push you with an oh so lovely smile into the direction where they wanna have you!!!
greetings, sarah sofia