Robber look-alike: “it’s not me!”

Local businessman Ruben Prince says people have been phoning him from all over the province asking if he was one of the robbers involved in a shoot-out with police earlier this month.

But Prince says they’ve got it all wrong – and anyone can see he’s innocent just by looking at the back of his head. People started calling him to ask why he’d become a criminal after a photo appeared in the 7 May edition of Grocott’s Mail that showed a trio of robbers being arrested in Zolani informal settlement.

One of the robbers wearing a blue jersey and whose face was turned away from the camera could be mistaken for Prince, and he believes this is where the confusion began.

On Monday an indignant Prince came into the Grocott’s Mail offices to set the record straight. He told our reporter that didn’t know who the man in the blue jersey was, but that he should be in jail by now. "I was not involved in crime in any place," he said.

"I have not been arrested at any time and I am not a criminal. "I have been receiving calls from people all over the Eastern Cape asking me, 'Why? Why did I rob?’ "I am clearing my name to all the Grocott’s Mail readers and those who think that it was me."

The only people who saw the picture and knew it wasn’t Prince were his younger brothers, he said. They knew this because the man in the picture has a noticeable mole on the back of his head. "I don’t have a mole on my head," Prince said.