A young child was among 12 shoppers left stranded in a Counterfeit Street store after a worker ran off with the key. The stores are 'structurally unsafe and littered with rat and urine faeces', police warned.
At around 2pm on Friday, January 6, police say they were alerted to a counterfeit store on Moulton Street, Strangeways, where the shopkeepers had 'locked members of the public in against their will whilst they ran off with the keys in an attempt to escape'. Officers detained one of the spotters who had alerted the shopkeepers of the police presence and located a key fob to the shop.
The shutters had deliberately been disabled from the inside and there was no way of getting in or out easily, according to Greater Manchester Police. Officers had to break down the shutters to get inside, where they found 12 people locked in, including a young child.
