Pickpockets nab Paris police chief’s smartphone

PARIS—A group of audacious pickpockets has managed to nab the smartphone of Paris’s chief of police while he was preparing to board a train, police sources said on Wednesday.

The thieves at the Gare de Lyon train station distracted Paris police prefect Michel Gaudin by asking him to sign a petition and swiped the mobile telephone from his pocket, the sources told AFP.

No sensitive information was contained in the phone, the sources said.

The embarrassing episode comes as the French interior ministry is in the midst of a campaign to raise public awareness of the growing risk of mobile telephone thefts.