FRIENDSHIP FLIGHT: Tony Circles the Globe : Suspect Arrested in Theft : The Mounties Get Their Man

Royal Canadian Mounted Police on Thursday recovered an estimated $3,000 in camera gear and clothing that was reported stolen the previous night from an entourage traveling with 11-year-old Tony Aliengena, the San Juan Capistrano youth who is flying around the world.

The Mounties also announced that they had arrested a local man in connection with the break-in and theft at the Frobisher Inn, where Tony and 15 members of his entourage are staying.

The 24-year-old man, who cannot be identified until conviction under Canadian law, is from nearby Lake Harbor but was arrested in this Arctic Circle village. Mounted Constable Jim Cook said the man had checked into a room across from where Tony’s father, Gary Aliengena, had stowed most of the crew’s gear. He was taken into custody without incident and will be held without bail pending trial on charges of break-in and entry.

Because the man is a convicted criminal on probation for a previous break-in and theft, Cook said, he faces a possible prison term of three to five years.

Group Was Eating

The property taken Wednesday night included camera gear belonging to both Gary Aliengena and Alexie Grinevich, a Soviet journalist accompanying the flight, Cook said. Some clothing belonging to Tony and his father was also removed from a bag, he said.

The break-in occurred while the Aliengena family and their entourage were eating dinner. Maxim Chikin, a fellow Soviet correspondent, discovered the theft when he returned from dinner to the ransacked room.

“They have taken my stuff,” Chikin said.

Chikin and Grinevich later told the authorities that a man staying in a room across the hallway had watched them as they unloaded luggage into the room. The Soviets, who arrived here in a chase plane about an hour after Tony landed, identified the suspect in custody as the person they had seen.

The theft was viewed as a major embarrassment in this wind-swept outpost of 3,200 inhabitants, most of them native Inuits. To help soften the blow, the Mounted Police detachment here Thursday morning delivered a packet of souvenir stickers and pins for the entourage.

Cook said the suspect was relatively easy to apprehend because Iqaluit is an island community, closed off to the world except for an airport that operates commercial flights only by day.

‘Least We Can Do’

“We’ve got a bunch of people traveling through here on good cause and it’s the least we can do to try and help them out,” Cook said of Tony’s friendship mission around the world.

Tony’s father assured the Canadians that there were no hard feelings. The Aliengena family rested in Iqaluit on Thursday, meeting students at the local school and taking joy rides around a frozen bay on a Hoverjet.

“We had a ball here,” Aliengena said at an Iqaluit press conference Thursday night.

Tony’s flight was scheduled to resume at 8:30 a.m. PDT today, with a 1,700-mile flight across the North Atlantic Ocean from Iqaluit to Reykjavik, Iceland. The flight is expected to last nine hours, not including a two-hour refueling stop in bGreenland.

On Saturday, Tony is scheduled to make European landfall at Oslo, Norway.