UK police and Interpol are hot on the trail of a troop of thirty-plus chimpanzees that escaped from their enclosure at Chester Zoo in Cheshire this weekend, forcing visitors to flee in terror.
The animals found their way into a nearby keepers’ area where they pillaged the locker room for clothing – and an office safe and filing cabinets of petty cash, company cheques, a laptop computer, hand-held radios and cellphones – before driving off down the M56 motorway in staff vehicles.
Ms. Candida Fuctifino, a spokeswoman for the zoo, told a reporter from the Primates Gazette that apparently the chimpanzees were a fresh troop recently arrived from darkest Africa and were suspected of harbouring radical Islamic leanings.
How the animals came to escape their maximum security enclosure is still under investigation but wire cutters and lock picking tools were found at their points of departure.
A search of the chimp’s indoor sleeping quarters also uncovered a Swahili translation of the Koran, a 4 x 4 SUV driver’s handbook and copies of the Highway Code.
A 5GB ByteStore USB high speed Dataferry flash drive data stick – similar to those used by Jolly Jihad terrorists – was found hidden in a bunch of bananas and is currently being examined by police computer experts for clues to the escapee’s purpose and intentions.
Zoo officials are convinced the break-out was not spontaneous and had actually been pre-planned by the chimps as they had also unlocked and opened the gates to the tiger’s den as a diversion to camouflage their clean escape.
Fortunately only one male tiger and a pair of tigress’s got loose into the general visitor’s area – where they attacked and mauled several Albanian tourists before being stabbed and kicked to death by a mixed gang of teenage chavs and hooded scallies on a school trip from Liverpool.
Lennie Scrunt, a 16 year old pupil at Scouseland’s prestigious Darth Vader College for Latter Day Siths, told reporters “Dese effin’ big stripey tigers came chargin’ across at us like – after they’d ripped the shit outa the Pikey tourists – so we said ‘fuck it’ and went fer ‘em. Me Mum’s gonna love the tiger skin rug we got.”
Government authorities are concerned that a similar Planet of the Apes type scenario might well manifest as did in 2006 when a troop of chimps absconded from the Crapsvale Safari Park adjoining Kent’s Smegmaford Forest following a Primate Union protest and mutiny over the quality of their daily peanut and banana rations.
Police and immigration officers, working closely with veterinarians and pygmy trackers, spent eighteen months in hot pursuit before the escapees were re-captured.
While all had successfully avoided road blocks and vacated the search zone following the break-out, they had regrouped and signed on as being unemployed at a Southampton job centre the following day and been granted Jobseekers Allowance.
The first to be tracked down and apprehended by the Daktari Missing Pets agency two months later was working as a London mini-cab driver and charged with false benefit claims – and eventually deported back to Uganda.
Four of the troop had obtained forged passports and relocated to the Ukraine, working for an ex-KGB drug smuggling gang – until a fall-out occurred over them getting paid peanuts.
Three were arrested in Stockholm for identity theft and credit card fraud – and running the online pirate copy download website – Monkey Bay.
Several of the absconding chimps had been hired by Thomas Cook tours in tele-sales and travel guide capacities – with one working as an airline pilot.
Another of the troop had secured a job as a school teacher at Eton and two had won by-elections and gained seats in Parliament – on the Conservative back benches.
An unsubstantiated rumour claiming one chimp was awarded a knighthood in the 2008 New Year’s Honours list remains unsubstantiated.
With this second sophisticated primate break-out from Chester Zoo at weekend a scientific controversy is now raging that the chimp’s IQ’s have been boosted to well up in the three-figure ranks due a combination of their diet of genetically-modified bananas and global warming.