Can't live without Homer ?

This things happen only in Malaysia.
Malaysia Boleh !

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia: It was a caper that Bart would have loved — except the culprits got caught.

Two Malaysian college students believed to be over-exuberant fans of "The Simpsons" stole a life-sized figurine of Homer Simpson from a cinema, but police tracked them down and forced them to return it Thursday.

"This case has been solved," Mazlan Mansor, police chief of Malaysia's central Petaling Jaya district, told The Associated Press.

The fiberglass replica of Homer holding a TV remote control was part of a promotional display at a local cinema for the upcoming big-screen version of the U.S. TV cartoon series.

The exhibit included the rest of the Simpson family — Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie — sitting on a couch at a multiplex lobby in 1 Utama, a popular suburban shopping mall near Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia's largest city.

"Homer will be reunited with his family soon," Moo Hon Mei, 20th Century Fox's senior marketing director in Malaysia, told the AP. She said the studio suspected the thieves were "passionate fans who want to own a piece of 'The Simpsons' before the movie opens."

Cinema employees discovered the 1.2-meter-tall (4-feet-tall), statue had vanished Monday morning. Closed-circuit security cameras showed that two men carried the statue out at about 3 a.m. and took it to the mall's parking lot, where they put Homer in the boot of their car and sped away. The theft took only three minutes.

Police traced Homer's kidnappers through their car license plate and summoned them to the police station, where they returned the figurine unscathed Thursday, Mazlan said.

"They were students, only 21 or 22 years old," Mazlan said. "We've released them for now, and a decision will be made later on whether to charge them for theft."

The figurine costs 3,000 ringgit (US$860; €640) and was flown in from the United States, Moo said. The other Simpsons remain on display, but it was not immediately clear whether the mall has taken any extra security to curb further abductions, she said.

Moo said 20th Century Fox had offered a reward of 1,000 ringgit (US$285; €212) for information leading to the figurine's discovery.

"The Simpsons Movie" starts showing in Malaysia on July 26, one day before its U.S. launch.