The man, as yet unnamed, was arrested in Camden at around 3pm yesterday, and then again at 7.30pm, once for a burglary charge and then again for a mugging offence. The suspect’s lawyer Mr Chris Walton said ‘The police have to pay the price for such flimsily constructed computer graphics. Every time you hear of a crime on the news it flashes up a ‘photo-fit’ of the suspect, and no-one has ever pointed out that each one of these faces looks more or less the same, and that similarity is also, by unlucky chance, shared by my client.’

But the police say that they can only work with the information that they have been given, and that if the suspect walks around wearing ‘bomber jacket and jeans’ then he is asking to be arrested. Accompanying his client as they left Camden Police Station the Mr Walton said ‘My client is an honest man who just happens to suffer from a rare facial disfigurement in which his face looks like an identikit photo. This is discrimination, pure and simple.’ As they walked down the steps of the station, the pair sighed wearily on hearing a returning Police Constable shouting ‘There he is! Quick, get him!’

The identikit scandal is the second setback to hit the Met this month. Two weeks ago, police were criticized for releasing an ‘artist’s impression’ of a suspect without having checked whether or not the likeness was being done by a rubbish artist.

barrowboy