A heartbroken Dublin woman has issued a plea for help to find her beloved dog after he went missing last week.
Aoife Connolly fears her pet dog, Koba, may have been snatched mere minutes after her mum left the house in Michael Collins Park, Clondalkin on Thursday morning. She told Dublin Live: "My mum was home at 11.25 am to get her bank card and she left. He was out in our back garden then.
"I think he went missing at 11.30am. Myself and my brother were home an hour later at 12.30pm and the gate was broken.
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"So we’re not sure whether somebody had tampered with it or Koba was jumping at the gate and it came loose and broke off the lock."
Aoife said the two-and-a-half-year-old German Shepherd was very protective of the house and never left their garden. She said: "My feeling is somebody had taken him pretty quickly.
"If he did get out by himself and somebody saw him and snatched him, or if somebody planned something and tampered with my gate, we just don’t know."
Aoife described Koba as a "big, boisterous" dog who doesn't like strangers. "So we were saying he would have made a scene if he was roaming around.
"If he was walking for long, somebody would have seen something." But she said that Koba liked cars so he may have jumped into a stranger's vehicle.
He said: "That was my other fear because people were saying he wouldn’t have got into a random car but he possibly could have. He would jump straight into the car.
"He loves it. Sometimes when I bring him out on a walk and I’m walking out of my garden, he’ll be going towards my car because he thinks he’s going somewhere nice."
Aoife, who has had Koba since he was a puppy, is beside herself with worry.
"We’re devastated. We’re trying everything we can. Since Thursday, we haven’t been in work, we’ve just been searching."
She said Koba had a gold chain on him when he went missing. "Other than that he’s a shorthaired german shepherd. He has quite a dark face and he has a skin tag on his right leg. You’ll see a bit of the fur is gone on it and it’s just grey."
If you know anything about Koba and his whereabouts you can contact Aoife at aoifecanning1@outlook.com.
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