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[00:00.67] Police suspected someone was stealing shoes from a children’s school in southwestern Japan.

[00:09.44] But a security camera caught the thief in action.

[00:14.22] It was a weasel!

[00:16.34] The small animal with a long body and short legs usually hunts for rats and rabbits.

[00:25.11] But this one was hunting for children’s shoes.

[00:29.36] After the children’s shoes began disappearing, police put in place three security cameras in the school in Fukuoka in southern Japan.

[00:42.11] Soon after, recorded video showed a weasel with a small shoe in its mouth.

[00:49.28] “It’s great it turned out not to be a human being,” Deputy Police Chief Hiroaki Inada told The Associated Press recently.

[01:00.70] Teachers and parents had feared the thief could be a person with mental health problems.

[01:07.87] Japanese often take their shoes off before entering homes.

[01:13.45] The shoes that disappeared were all slip-ons the children wore indoors, stored in special spaces near the door.

[01:24.08] Weasels are known to hide items.

[01:27.80] People who keep weasels as pets give them toys so they can hide them.

[01:34.17] The weasel moved shoes around and took 15 of them before police were called.

[01:42.67] Six more were taken the following day.

[01:46.65] The weasel returned to steal one more shoe.

[01:50.64] The video of that theft was seen the next day.

[01:55.42] The shoe-loving weasel only took the white indoor shoes made of canvas, likely because they are light to carry.

[02:05.51] “We were so relieved,” the school’s kindergarten director Yoshihide Saito told Japanese broadcaster RKB Mainichi Broadcasting.

[02:18.27] The children got a good laugh when they saw the weasel in the video.

[02:24.10] Although the stolen shoes were never found, the remaining shoes are now safely behind netting that covers the storage spaces.

[02:34.99] The weasel, which is believed to be wild, is still on the loose.