Four foreigners who tied up the owners of a home in Italy and robbed them later apologised, gave the stolen goods back, and help clean after saying they’d realised they had targeted the wrong house.
The four individuals, described as being foreigners to Italy and wearing masks, entered a house in Bagno a Ripoli, a town located near Florence in Tuscany, earlier this week around 9 pm at night.
After finding the elderly owners of the home present along with their daughter’s family, they tied up the residents and threatened them with a firearm and a crowbar before stealing various valuables and heading to the basement to search for a specific item, Il Giornale reports.
The group of four thieves soon realised they were in the wrong home and returned upstairs where they untied their captives and apologised, claiming they had targetted the wrong home and were looking for another person, a lawyer.
After returning the valuables they had stolen, the men also helped to tidy up the home and any mess they had caused. The group also bleached the floor of the basement, likely also in an effort to destroy any forensic evidence of their presence in the home.
After the four fled the scene, the victims alerted the local Carabinieri who are said to be investigating the incident and reviewing CCTV footage from the area to help identify the individuals.
The bizarre incident comes months after a similar case in Naples in which thieves stole a watch from a tourist at gunpoint in the Piazza Trieste e Trento and then another youth came back to return the watch to the owner and apologise after the thieves realised the watch was a fake, rather than a legitimate Richard Mille timepiece, worth over 300,000 euros.
Francesco Emilio Borrelli, a councillor for the Campania region, commented on the incident saying, “So, knowing the law, they sent another kid to return it. Because they know the bars there have CCTV, and they know that images were recorded. And in front of the law, to have brought the watch back means a much lighter punishment. Because they’ve committed the robbery, but they did bring back the property.”