Two men have been charged in a Doha court with stealing jewelry by making a hole in a wall to gain access to a shop, according to local media reports.

The thieves allegedly drilled through the wall of a tailor’s shop next door to a jewelry store at 11pm on a Thursday evening after the owner closed for the night.

The owner of the tailor shop alerted police of the hole when he visited his store on Friday morning.

The Peninsula reports that the crime appears to have been highly sophisticated, with the thieves deactivating security cameras and leaving no fingerprints behind.

It’s not known how much jewelry the men stole.

The newspaper reports that the thieves were later arrested by police – although it’s not clear how they were found. 

This is not the only high-profile theft of valuables in Qatar in recent months.

Earlier this month, two successful police investigations led to the arrests of reportedly crooked security guards at a Doha mall and a group of Western male tourists who had more stolen than QR8 million ($2.2 million) worth of jewellery from a shop in Al Sadd.

News of these thefts follows a dramatic increase in reported crimes in Qatar, according to the 2011 Sustainable Development Indicators, released earlier this month by the Qatar Statistics Authority. 

It shows that there were 320 crimes per 100,000 people in 2001, compared to to 2,355 crimes in 2010.

Qatar does, however, still enjoy one of the lowest crime rates in the world.

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Credit: Photo by Kate Gardiner