Tyre Slasher Ordered to Knit Jumpers as Recompense

Local yob youths in malicious tyre shredding frenzy? Nope. Teenage punks slash defenceless parked cars in drug-crazed rampage? Not even close. Forget the community rag hyperbole, tyre terror recently took on a very different shape and form…

In the German city of Kaiserslautern, an 89-year-old woman has been told to take up knitting as a means of avoiding prosecution for slashing more than 50 tyres. This news was delivered by prosecutor Helmet Bleh, the man faced with the unenviable task of presenting the case against the senior slasher. “We’ll drop the case if she knits a few pullovers,” Bleh said sagely. “We can’t send her to prison, and she doesn’t have the money to pay a fine.”

He added there was no longer a danger of the pensioner becoming a repeat offender because she had now been moved to a retirement home. Bleh said the woman had agreed to knit pullovers for some of the other residents at the home. The penalty was suggested by a social worker assigned to look after the former tyre fiend, a person presumably unaware of the other uses a sharp-ended knitting needle could be put to.

Police have been unable to determine what prompted the woman to go on her tyre-slashing spree in the small town of Rockenhausen in April.