Police Baffled by ‘Tweed-Jacket Gang' Attack in Edinburgh

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

A 33-year-old man was attacked in Edinburgh over the weekend by a gang dressed in tweed, brogues, shirts, and jackets, in what experts are calling the first recorded instance of a man being beaten up by a group of time travelers.

As the Scotsman reports, police are appealing for witnesses who may have been there while the incident took place in the Cowgate area of the city during what the Scottish call the "wee hours" of Sunday morning. There is currently no evidence of DeLorean scorch marks—or any residue from a powerful crystal that the time travelers grasped as they were spirited rapidly back to the Victorian time from which they came—but that could honestly just be because the police aren't looking hard enough.

Here's what Detective Sergeant Neil Stowart had to say about it all: "This appears to have been an unprovoked assault which left the victim needing hospital treatment. We are appealing for anyone who was in the area of the Cowgate around 2:30 AM on Sunday morning [that's Sunday March 18, 2015, on the current timeline we're on] and who saw this altercation take place."

The victim was attacked unprovoked from behind, but did manage to get a glimpse of their attackers and their curious getups before they sprinted away. As a result, police are appealing to anyone who was out in the city on Saturday night and noticed a group of lads not wearing football shirts to come forward with information.

"The group of suspects have been described as wearing distinctive tweed jackets, and so we hope this description will assist in jogging people's memories, particularly if they have information on which pub or bar they were in beforehand."

I can think of three theories to explain the attack:

• An aforementioned group of raging time travelers, furious about the death of Prince Albert, decided to leap forward in time by 154 years and go out on the radge, experiencing the delights of our modern kebabs and deep-fried food before going back to Victorian times to look at a pocket watch and die.
• Some of those "hipsters" you hear about went postal when the nearby Black Bull ran out of small-batch microbrew and decided to kick the shit out of someone.
• A university rugby team decided to have a "posh-cunts" theme night and finished the evening in the traditional manner of a university rugby club—that is, by running through an innocent bystander before going home to bray about all the tops they've ever had in their life.

Anyway, police are still looking for leads, and seeing as the victim was taken to Edinburgh Royal Infirmary with facial injuries and a fractured arm, it's not grassing to call them with information. Contact Police Scotland on 101 or Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111 if you know anything about men from a distant past coming to the future to beat our innocent citizens about the face, arm, and face again.

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