A Mercedes

Mumbai, Aug. 11: How far would you go to impress your girlfriend? Ask Abogit Samson, and he’d tell you nothing is too far — even 1,000 kilometres in a stolen car.

But the 19-year-old engineering student must be ruing his reckless rush after Mumbai police arrested him yesterday for stealing the Mercedes- Benz from a Bangalore showroom.

Police sources said Samson, who drove all the way from Bangalore to Mumbai to meet his girlfriend, a student of Ruia College, was intercepted along with two friends, both teenagers, on a flyover after a chase.

“The boy told me he did this to impress his girlfriend, whom he had met when he was living in Mumbai. We have lodged a vehicle theft offence and handed the boys to Bangalore police,” said deputy commissioner Sunil Ramanand.

Asked if Samson, whose father works with a multinational company in Bangalore, met his girlfriend, Ramanand said: “No. I am sure she would not have been impressed with the antics of her boyfriend.”

The police said Samson, whose family moved to Bangalore a few years back, and his friends — Nitin Joseph, 17, and Neeraj Mohandas, 16 — visited the showroom on Wednesday on the pretext of buying a second-hand Mercedes.

Samson told the staff he wanted to go on a test drive and drove around the Silicon city with a showroom representative before assaulting and throwing him out of the car.

He then hit the highway to Mumbai, 998km away, for the scent of his woman, much like the blind Lt-Col Frank Slade who goes on an audacious test ride by zipping around New York City in a Ferrari.

But unlike Samson, Slade, immortalised by Al Pacino in the film Scent of a Woman, took off to fulfil one of his last wishes.

In Bangalore, after the showroom employees filed a complaint of theft and assault, the police alerted their Mumbai counterparts and also sent a team to the Maharashtra capital by road to trace the trio.

A Mumbai police team spotted a black Mercedes with a Karnataka registration number parked near Ruia College. Samson and his friends tried to flee but were intercepted on the Sion flyover in central Mumbai.