How Dare You Try to Rob Rwandan Military Attache Vincent Nyakarundi?
Lt. Col. Vincent Nyakarundi, a veteran of African peacekeeping missions, is Rwanda's first-ever military attache to the UN. He doesn't need to come all that way to get mugged. Could you face crime with the equanimity of Vincent Nyakarundi?
The NY Post reports that Lt. Col. Nyakarundi's driver pulled up outside a store on 2nd Ave and 45th St. last Friday morning. As his driver was in the store, a fiendish ruffian engaged in thoroughly undiplomatic behavior!
"I was writing messages on my laptop. The robber came to the window. He was having a gun hidden in a cloth...Then he said, ‘Give me all what you have. Otherwise, I will kill you.' I said, ‘Why, what is that.'"
Why indeed? "At the beginning, I thought he was joking. And when he started counting, I knew it was serious. That's when he took all my belongings," summarizes Nyakarundi, a cool customer if ever there was one. After handing over his laptop and a thousand bucks in cash, the military man and adoptive father of a son who survived the Rwandan genocide took matters into his own hands.
"Then I went out of the car and chased him. I was expecting that I would meet a police car on the road. I was shouting [at him], ‘Bring my belongings'" Nyakarundi said.
"He was scared because I was aggressively following him. And people started gathering. I was not very scared."
"Bring my belongings!" bellowed the UN attache as he hurtled down Second Avenue in pursuit of a gun-wielding strongarm robber at 10:45 on a Friday morning. Is it any surprise that the thief dropped the belongings he had stolen in order to flee more rapidly? Nyakarundi, who simply retrieved his electronics from the pavement as the mortified criminal made his escape at top speed, tells the newspaper "I think anybody who is brave can do it." Indeed, good sir. Indeed.
