By ETGAR LEFKOVITS
In a burglary gone wrong, a Palestinian car thief who hijacked a car in the northern Jerusalem neighborhood of French Hill on Friday with a nine-year-old boy inside dropped the vehicle off with the kid unharmed near a West Bank checkpoint after realizing that the child was Arab and that police were in hot pursuit, police said.
The car thief called the child's father during the late-morning police chase and told him that "thought that the car owners were Jewish," Jerusalem Police spokesman Shmuel Ben-Ruby said.
The suspected Palestinian car thief slipped into the West Bank and remains at large, police said.
The incident came less than 48 hours after a routine police arrest of another suspected Arab car thief in an east Jerusalem neighborhood turned violent, with an Arab passenger shot dead by police.