This is the moment a cage fighter pins a crook to the pavement after catching him red-handed as he mugged a woman for her mobile phone.

MMA fighter Felipe Colares shared online a video of him restraining the thief in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on 25th January.

Colares, 28, told his 61,500 Instagram followers: “When returning from training this afternoon we saw an alleged assault on a woman on Recreio dos Bandeirantes Beach.”

He said he and his friends “intervened and managed to immobilise him just using jiu-jitsu techniques”.

The video footage shows Colares sitting on the crook’s stomach while he pins down one of his arms with his knee and grabs the other with his hand.

Colares prevented the crook – a young man with ‘Mae’ (‘Mother’) tattooed on his chest – from fleeing until police arrived and seized him.

He wrote: “We managed to capture the criminal, we recovered the victim’s mobile phone, and today we have one less robber on our streets.”

But he added: “I do not recommend that untrained people take this kind of action.”

Colares – from Macapa – competed for the UFC between January 2019 and June 2022.

He has 10 wins and four losses in his professional career to date.