The nifty snatcher and his evening mission

Every mobile phone owner, more or less, experiences the onset of panic and despair the moment he realises his phone is missing. But what happened to me is more than that when I suddenly saw my mobile phone gone in the blink of an eye.

The story may sound bizarre, but whenever I think of the incident, a shiver goes down my spine.

It all happened on Sunday midnight when I was returning to my Bashundhara home by my office-hired CNG-run three-wheeler in a relatively calm Dhaka city. One of my colleagues was also with me.

Like other three-wheelers, our vehicle had mesh-doors closed just to ward off any untoward people to enter inside. I took my Samsung Galaxy S4 mobile phone out of my pocket as soon as the vehicle started rolling past my office around 10:30pm.

Tired of daylong work, I just wanted to refresh myself and thus hooked up in the social networking website. I was tweeting and all went well until I reached Banani.

A few metres after the vehicle had crossed the Banani intersection, I saw my mobile literally flew away from my hand. Dumbfounded, I looked here and there, thinking where it went away. I was confused and panicked too and told the driver to stop. He stopped the vehicle within a few second and I started searching the phone inside the vehicle.

But the phone was nowhere. To his utter dismay, the three-wheeler driver discovered a hole in the sheet covering the vehicle's roof. "Certainly a snatcher took away the phone by making this hole," the driver said, adding that this kind of snatching had been going on for quite some time now.

But we were shocked and started wondering how the thief got onto the running vehicle and did all these so meticulously.

"It is a unique way to snatch mobile phones," the driver said, adding that sometimes they injure passengers with knives with which they make the hole.

I was terrified and thanked God that we were spared from any bodily harm. The rest of the way, I couldn't rid myself of the thought how the snatcher made it possible. Even after I reached home, I couldn't get a wink of sleep.

So be aware. Try not to work on your mobile phone while riding such vehicles especially at night unless the use of phone is very, very urgent.