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LIKE Cinderella, Mohamed Ali Abdul Ghani fled in a hurry, leaving not a glass slipper, but a shoe behind.
Unlike Cinderella, there was no fairy-tale ending for the 35-year-old snatch thief, who had grabbed a purse from a 25-year-old woman in August last year.
The sweat from the sole of his foot, left in his shoe, was what did him in.
On Thursday, Ali was jailed 15 months after he admitted to snatching the purse from the woman and making off with $25 in cash on Aug 18 last year. He could have been jailed up to seven years.
A district court heard how Ali had followed the woman on the pavement outside Block 246 in Jurong East Street 24 at about 9.30 that night.
He trailed her for a while, then walked up to her side, grabbed her purse and ran away.
Ali hotfooted it to a nearby block, but in trying to shake off a pursuing bystander, dropped his shoe.
Policemen arriving at the scene seized the shoe and mapped his DNA profile from his sweat stains. Every individual's deoxyribonucleic acid, which is easily obtained from blood, saliva, skin and semen, has a unique fingerprint.
But they had to wait a year before they could match the genetic profile to the man.
In July this year, Ali was convicted and jailed 10 weeks for another theft. As a convicted criminal, he had to submit a body sample to be included in a national DNA database aimed at helping police solve crimes.
The police came knocking when his DNA turned out to match the one from the shoe.
In his mitigation on Thursday, Ali pleaded for leniency and managed to convince the court to backdate the jail term to Dec 8 when he was first arrested.
Read the full report in Friday's edition of The Straits Times.
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