Will Robbie Coltrane take any action to remove his picture from New Zealand's "Wanted" poster?

“WANTED”, screams the poster above a picture of the actor Robbie Coltrane: “Active Burglar in this Neighborhood”.

Police in New Zealand issued the leaflet after a spate of burglaries in Christchurch, the country’s second-largest city — though they concede that the Cracker and Harry Potter star has not turned to crime on the other side of the world.

New Zealand law bans photographs of young offenders from being published, so officers decided that Coltrane was the next best thing.

“Robbie Coltrane is not the burglar but imagine him aged 16 with lank greasy hair and you have the picture,” the leaflet states.

It says that the wanted burglar “is 16 years old, lives locally, travels by bicycle and burgles houses in your street. He will break windows to gain entry and ransack the property, targeting electronic items, cash and jewellery”. Coltrane, it should be pointed out, is 58, lives in Stirlingshire, and is rather too comfortably proportioned to climb through the average window.

He has also been appointed OBE and played Rubeus Hagrid in all five Harry Potter films, which renders it unnecessary for him to augment his income by creeping out at night with a hooped jumper and bag marked “Swag”.

The leaflet, which has been pushed through letterboxes in central Christchurch, explains: “Because of the Children and Young Persons Act 1989, police cannot show you a picture of the 16-year-old burglar operating in your neighbourhood.”

Sergeant Phil Dean, one of the officers who came up with the campaign, said: “It’s a provocative thing to get people to read our crime prevention information.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article4479961.ece