Minion-themed gas canister stolen by masked thief

A man says he feels "sick to his stomach" after a gas cannister painted as a minion was stolen from his front garden.

Mark Ryan, from Woodthorpe, Nottinghamshire, won the item from a charity raffle in 2017 after buying £200 worth of tickets.

The 53-year-old said someone in the local community had painted the canister to match the film character after his son took his own life and had entered it into the raffle to raise money for suicide prevention charity Campaign Against Living Miserably [CALM].

However security footage showed a man and a woman riding an electric bike pinching it from outside their home in Grange Road on Sunday night.

"It's got no [monetary] value but to us it was something that people noticed," Ryan said.

"He has been outside for the last six or seven years so he is a little rough around the edges but that is what gives him a little bit of character.

"He has got blue welly boots on. The guy that made it put so much effort into it.

"For us it's the fun element - to him there was a big meaning to it."

Ryan, who works as a surveyor, said a man wearing a balaclava and a woman on an e-bike stole the canister at about 22:45 BST on Sunday before the family noticed it was gone a couple of days later.

They checked CCTV cameras and said the "sinister" footage showed the man involved donning a balaclava.

"Its technically a garden ornament why would you want to put a balaclava on? It is not exactly a bank robbery," he said.

"If they just came and dropped it back or put it somewhere [where] it could be found, that's all we want."

Ryan said he had contacted a number of local scrapyards to see if it had been discarded and had reported the theft to Nottinghamshire Police.

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