Imagine making a false emergency services call. Now imagine making 122 fake calls in 78 days

Three years in jail seems a little on the low side for this clown.

Shaffi

There are situations where young people make fake calls to the emergency services and have to be warned off. Annoying, possibly life threatening, but part of life I suppose. This case though, is at a level I’ve never seen before. Because they aren’t kids.

Shahid Khan, 31, and Zaynul Shaffi, 44, from Birmingham made 122 fake calls to the 999 service in the West Midlands over 78 days. During the calls they claimed :

• A baby named Josh had been left on train tracks after discovering his wife was cheating on him.

• That they’d killed their wife, drowned two children and planned to kill themselves and any police that turned up.

• They had been shot.

• They’d killed a man and left him in a local park after a dispute over money

• One of them had drowned their pregnant wife and family

• A man was attempting to sell them a sawn off shotgun for £80

Any of these fake calls could have resulted in a police shooting of an innocent person, police officers being killed in the line of duty or police and ambulances not turning up to other, real situations because they were dealing with more the “more serious” events mentioned above.

To avoid detection both had used multiple SIM cards, which meant more police time was wasted trying to locate the source of these fake calls. The estimated cost of catching them was £100,000 which seems very low to me. At one point one boasted to another that a helicopter had been sent to the scene of a fake crime he had reported.

Shaffi pled guilty and was sentenced to 3 years in jail. Khan, of Whichford Grove, Birmingham, was deemed unfit to stand trial, but was found by a jury to have committed the acts charged. He will be sentenced at a later date.

The real question is what makes men of 31 and 44 make such calls? It takes a special kind of stupid not to understand the chaos you are creating and the possible damage being done. You can listen to some of the calls on the WM police website here