Four decades after Bogota, the case of the Croatia official and the stolen paper

The W H Smith in the South Terminal at Gatwick Airport is the same as any other W H Smith. There are long queues, piles of books written by Jeremy Clarkson and wall-to-wall celebrity magazines. On Tuesday afternoon, however, something very strange happened there. While customers were flicking through the latest issue of Heat and finding out whether Chanelle from Big Brother 8 was still getting jiggy with Ziggy, shop assistants led a 67-year-old man into a back room and accused him of shoplifting.

So far, so UK in 2007. After all, a report published on Tuesday claimed that Great Britain was the shoplifting capital of Europe, with £26 million of goods going missing every day. But what the shoppers in W H Smith did not know was that the man being led away was Zorislav Srebric, the general secretary of the Croatian FA, who had just landed at Gatwick with Slaven Bilic’s squad for last night’s crucial Euro 2008 qualifying game at Wembley.

Srebric was accused of stealing stationery and newspapers and was arrested in front of stunned players before being released without charge on Tuesday night by Sussex Police. In a statement, the Croatian Football Federation (CFF) said that Srebric had forgotten to pay and rushed off to help his players through customs, but shop assistants thought that he had been trying to avoid paying for the goods.

“Unfortunately, he was taken to a police station, where they determined that it was a misunderstanding,” the statement read. “Instead of five minutes, he stayed for a while because of procedure.”

Croatia’s little local difficulty at Gatwick ended with smiles and backs being patted – “I cannot imagine him stealing anything,” Vlatka Jandel, a spokeswoman for the CFF, said – but for anyone familiar with dodgy arrests involving football players, it will have brought back memories of Bobby Moore and a £600 missing bracelet in Bogotá.

On May 18, 1970, Moore, who was captain of England at the time, went into the Green Fire shop in the Tequendama Hotel in Colombia’s capital city, with Bobby Charlton, to find a present for Charlton’s wife before a friendly. The store owner, Danilo Rojas, and a shop assistant, Carla Padilla, called the police after the players left the shop and accused Moore of stealing a bracelet.

The players denied the accusations but on May 25, Moore was charged and placed under house arrest at the home of a local football official before being released three days later, so that he could play in the World Cup finals in Mexico.

Moore, who died in 1993, had to wait until December 1975 for his name to be cleared when the case was finally closed. Secret documents released in 2001 revealed that British diplomats in Colombia had been instructed by Harold Wilson, the Prime Minister, to make sure that Moore was not sent to prison. More documents released in 2003 showed that the head of the Colombian police was convinced that Moore was innocent and that the prime suspect was an unidentified woman with links to Colombian gangsters.

In 1970, a missing bracelet caused the scandal that cast a shadow over England’s preparations for the World Cup finals. Fast-forward to 2007 and a missing toilet seat almost led to the career of a Premier League star going down the pan. Despite earning £30,000 a week, Glen Johnson, the Portsmouth defender, stunned onlookers at a B&Q in Dartford, Kent, in January when he was caught trying to steal bathroom fittings.

Helped by his friend, Ben May, the Millwall striker, Johnson was spotted by a security guard putting a toilet seat into a box with a cheaper price tag. He also hid a set of taps underneath a sink at the checkout to avoid paying for them. Both were given £80 on-the-spot fines by police. “We all recognised Johnson,” a worker at the store said. “They seemed to find the whole thing funny and couldn’t stop smirking, even after they had been arrested.”

Identity parade

Rob Lee and Warren BartonThe former Newcastle United players were arrested in East London in July after they were accused of stealing a limousine, crashing it into a van and fleeing the scene. The owner of the car decided last month that he did not want to press charges against the pair.

Bobby Moore The England captain was accused of stealing a £600 bracelet in Bogotá, Colombia, before the World Cup finals in Mexico in 1970.

Glen Johnson and Ben May Johnson and May were each fined £80 for stealing bathroom fittings.

Ohio State University Forget soccer, American football is in a league of it own for bad behaviour. In nine months in 2005 and 2006, 17 members of the Ohio State University team were arrested for offences ranging from drug abuse to assault.