The 17-year old became trapped in the Volvo he had broken into in Norway

Christmas came early for police in Trondheim when a would-be car thief called the local station to confess he was locked inside the vehicle he was trying to steal.

“He called us just before 8am on Christmas Eve from inside the car he had just broken into,” Ebbe Kimo, the operations manager for the Trøndelag force in central Norway, said in an interview with the state broadcaster NRK.

“He couldn’t open the doors. He knows us quite well and clearly thought it would be OK to call us for help. A bit like calling a friend, really.”

Kimo said the 17-year-old thief had managed to open the doors of a Volvo parked outside a dealership in Norway’s third-largest city, not far from the prison, without doing any noticeable damage to the car, but subsequently found himself trapped by its centralised locking system.

“He sounded quite stressed and desperate when he called us, and I think he was relieved when we arrived,” the officer told TV2.

Politiet i Trøndelag (@PolitiTrondelag) #Trondheim

Ung biltjuv ringte fra bilforretning på Tunga etter mislykket forsøk på å stjele en bil. Vel inne i bilen ble han sittende fast bak låste dører. Da er det greit å kunne ringe politiet for å be om hjelp. Patrulje var raskt på stedet og fikk ham ut og inn til arresten.

Kimo added that although the youth was well known to the station for a series of petty crimes, including car thefts, he was “perhaps not the most knowledgeable car thief”. “On his previous attempts, he was at least able to get out of the car,” he said.

Kimo told VG newspaper a police patrol was “on the spot very rapidly” to release the youth, who would be questioned before being sent home “to a hopefully warm Christmas celebration … It’s nice to be able to call the police when you’re stuck.”

The bungled theft came days after an armed man committed the first bank robbery in living memory in the world’s northernmost settlement, Longyearbyen on Norway’s Svalbard Arctic archipelago, but was caught a matter of minutes later.

Police said the suspected robber was not a native of the town, which lies 1,000km from the north pole and whose 2,000 inhabitants, most of whom know each other by sight, are outnumbered by the area’s polar bears.