
Police and security forces are on the trail of a laptop that was stolen from the home of an employee of the Prime Minister's Office that may have contained top-secret information, police said. However, investigators in the Prime Minister's Office said that the laptop most likely did not contain such information. The theft was apparently carried out by common criminals, police said.
According to a report in Yediot Achronot, later confirmed by police, the brazen thieves entered the locked door of the home of the employee Sunday evening. The thieves were observed by a nanny employed by the family. The nanny screamed when she saw the thieves, who immediately absconded – but not before grabbing a briefcase belonging to the employee, inside of which was the laptop which contained “top-level security documents,” police said.
Investigators for the Prime Minister's Office said that the thieves were most likely looking for the keys to the employee’s car. Besides the briefcase, the thieves apparently took the employee’s wallet, cellphone, and several personal effects.
Police have opened an investigation, but said that finding the thieves might be difficult. The theft was one of many breaking-and-entering incidents that occur almost daily in the Sharon region, east of Tel Aviv, Herzliya, and Netanya. Although they do not have clues as to the identity of the thieves, a special unit is investigating the theft in the many Arab towns of the “triangle,” the large Arab population center east of the Sharon, where many of the gangs of robbers in the Sharon area are thought by police to hail from.
“The police seem unwilling or unable to do something about these constant thefts, whether from homes or of cars,” a resident of Rosh Ha'ayin, a large town outside of Petach Tikvah adjacent to the large Arab town of Kafr Kassem, told Arutz Sheva. “Rosh Ha'ayin is a city of over 40,000 people – good-sized by Israeli standards – and yet after 10 PM, you cannot enter the town without stopping at a security guard post, where the guards look into your vehicle and try to size up who you are, why you are coming to Rosh Ha'ayin, what your business here is, etc. They do this because they are trying to stop the many thieves that come to 'visit' us nightly from Kafr Kassem. It's ridiculous that we have to live like we are in a small country town, where we are surrounded by hordes of highwaymen, but it's like this everywhere where Jews live in proximity to Arabs in the center of the country.
“Ironically, the safest places, it seems to me, are the towns in Judea and Samaria, which are fenced in, and where Arabs must have special permits to enter, for security reasons,” said the Rosh Ha'ayin resident. "The rate of property and auto theft in these towns is usually very low."