The W H Smith in the South Terminal at Gatwick Airport is the same as any other W H Smith. There are long queues, piles of books written by Jeremy Clarkson and wall-to-wall celebrity magazines. On Tuesday afternoon, however, something very strange happened there.

While customers were flicking through Heat and finding out whether Chanelle from Big Brother 8 was still getting jiggy with Ziggy, shop assistants led a 67-year-old man into a back room and accused him of shoplifting.

So far, so UK in 2007. A report published on Tuesday claimed that Great Britain was the shoplifting capital of Europe, with £26 million of goods going missing every day. But what the shoppers in W H Smith did not know was that the man being led away was Zorislav Srebric, the general secretary of the Croatian FA, who had landed at Gatwick with Slaven Bilic’s squad for last night’s crucial Euro 2008 qualifying game at Wembley.

Srebric was accused of stealing stationery and newspapers and was arrested in front of stunned players before being released without charge on Tuesday night by Sussex Police.

In a statement, the Croatian Football Federation (CFF) said that Srebric had forgotten to pay and rushed off to help his players through customs, but shop assistants thought that he had been trying to avoid paying.

“Unfortunately, he was taken to a police station, where they determined that it was a misunderstanding,” the statement read. “Instead of five minutes, he stayed for a while because of procedure.”

Croatia’s little difficulty ended with smiles and backs being patted — “I cannot imagine him stealing anything,” Vlatka Jandel, a spokeswoman for the CFF, said — but for anyone familiar with dodgy arrests involving football players, it will have brought back memories of Bobby Moore and a £600 missing bracelet in Bogotá.

On May 18, 1970, Moore, the England captain at the time, went into the Green Fire shop in the Tequendama Hotel in Colombia’s capital city, with Bobby Charlton, to find a present for Charlton’s wife. The store owner, Danilo Rojas, and a shop assistant, Carla Padilla, called the police after the players left the shop and accused Moore of stealing a bracelet.

The players denied the accusations but on May 25, Moore was charged and placed under house arrest before being released three days later, so that he could play in the World Cup finals in Mexico. Moore, who died in 1993, was eventually cleared in December 1975 when the case was finally closed.