Toy shop heist: Thieves tunnel into Hobart store, take $7,000 worth of goods
Thieves in Hobart have tunnelled into a toy shop and stolen thousands of dollars worth of goods from the store, according to police.
Officers said a hole was cut in a wall of the Toyworld store in Moonah on Friday night or early Saturday morning.
Thieves made off with $7,000 worth of expensive electrical toys - such as remote-controlled cars, helicopters and trains - and a safe containing about $1,000.
Proprietor Samm Harrington said he would not be able to reopen before Christmas.
"They'd tunnelled their way through, they jumped the fence, they ripped the wooden palings off the outside of the shop and smashed their way through," he said.
"We're probably going to be losing up to about 12 to 15 grand in trading dollars and we know we've lost at least seven grand in stock."
Mr Harrington will give police store security vision, which he said showed a man acting suspiciously last week.
"We've got a person on CCTV that came in on the Thursday, looked around the shop, spent a bit of time in that room and left," he said.
"He then came back on Friday, walked around, went into that room again and then decided to buy a $2 Hot Wheels car just to make sure he was purchasing something so he didn't get totally sussed out."
He said the incident had contributed to a decision not to renew the lease on the Moonah site.
"We were going to spend some more money on it next year in advertising and getting more people to know that we're in this area, and since this happened on Friday night we've decided we really don't want to be there anymore," he said.
Glenorchy CIB is investigating.
