Little person who stole three baby kangaroos from Russian zoos arrested

The thief who kidnapped three baby kangaroos from Russian zoos turned out to be a little person and repeated offender, 31-year-old Ivan Nekrasov from the Vologda region. During interrogation, he admitted that he stole the kangaroos to subsequently sell them.

The man has been engaged in stealing since his teenage years. He would steal mobile phones and small amounts of money. The man is less than 1.5 meters in height and he used his short stature to get into apartments and houses through cracks in doors and attic windows. In 2017, Nekrasov was caught for the first time, but he managed to escape prosecution. Two years later, he received a suspended sentence and was put on the federal wanted list.

He decided to kidnap the kangaroos after he had found buyers for the animals in advance. Having discussed the terms with them, the criminal went to Yaroslavl and Kaluga zoos.

One kidnapped baby kangaroo did not survive

Nekrasov managed to steal three baby kangaroos. Law enforcement officers found one of them in a large checkered bag that the thief had with him at the time when he was arrested on a train in the Vladimir region.

The perpetrator managed to sell one of the stolen kangaroos — the police are looking for the animal. The third baby kangaroo did not survive the ordeal and died.

Update: The third kidnapped baby kangaroo was found alive. 

The healthy baby kangaroo has already been brought back to the Yaroslavl Zoo. He remains under the supervision of veterinarians.

The criminal was detained and taken to the police station. A theft case has been opened against him.

The man told the police that he started kidnapping and selling baby kangaroos in order to buy a dream animal for himself — a rare macaque.

In the past he had tried to travel to Sochi with a crocodile. In 2020, Nekrasov brought the predator to the Ministry of Internal Affairs department to obtain a transportation permit for the animal, but the crocodile was confiscated and handed over to veterinarians.

The suspect in the kidnapping of baby kangaroos confessed to the crimes. According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the 31-year-old criminal stole the first animal in the Zavolzhsky district of Yaroslavl on September 27, when a baby kangaroo named Krosh was kidnapped. He stole two more animals three days later in the Kaluga region.

As experts note, there is indeed a demand for red-and-gray wallabies (a type of kidnapped kangaroo) on the black market now, since almost no marsupials have been brought from abroad lately.

Details

A wallaby  is a small or middle-sized macropod native to Australia and New Guinea, with introduced populations in New Zealand, Hawaii, the United Kingdom and other countries. They belong to the same taxonomic family as kangaroos and sometimes the same genus, but kangaroos are specifically categorised into the four largest species of the family. The term "wallaby" is an informal designation generally used for any macropod that is smaller than a kangaroo or a wallaroo that has not been designated otherwise.