AN undercover cop "chased himself round the streets" for 20 minutes in a town in southern England after a surveillance camera operator wrongly identified him as a suspect.

The junior officer was patrolling the area by foot, after a rash of burglaries, when a CCTV operator radioed him, warning of a man "acting suspiciously" in the vicinity, according to the latest issue of the Police Federation's Police magazine.

Monitoring the "suspect," the operator then directed the cop to the man's location. The officer - not realising that he was the "suspicious" character - began searching for his shadowy suspect.

The fruitless pursuit ended 20 minutes later when a sergeant entered the CCTV control room and pointed out that the cop and the suspect were the same person.

"Every time the man darted in to another side alleyway, the PC [police constable] was turning immediately into the same alleyway, but every time the CCTV operator asked what he could see there was no trace," an officer, who was not named, told Police magazine.

"With the sergeant's sides aching from laughter he pointed out to the PC that the operator had been watching him unaware that he was a plainclothes officer - thus the PC had been chasing himself round the streets."

None of the parties involved in the incident were identified. A Sussex Police spokesman told the (London) Daily Telegraph "without the date or location, confirming the details and locating the officer is harder for us than it was for the CCTV operator."

Read more at The Daily Telegraph.

Originally published as Cop ends up chasing himself after CCTV mix-up