A container carrying goods of an e-commerce company to Delhi via Aurangabad met with an accident on the Solapur-Dhule highway around 3am on Monday.
Villagers and passersby after the container truck overturned looted the goods. Goods worth Rs 75 lakh was looted from the overturned container till the police arrived. However, the police later managed to find the stolen goods worth Rs 40 lakh by drone and direct search.
As soon as the people of the nearby village came to know about the accident, around 150 people rushed to the spot. The men threatened the driver and started looting the container. As soon as the Yermala police came to know about this, a team arrived at the spot around 5 am. By then, however, most of the goods in the container had been looted till then.
The police had to form teams to launch a search operation in nearby areas to get people to return the items they had made away with.
"The truck was carrying mobile phones, computers, LEDs, toys and other electronic items. Villagers and passersby started taking away these things after they fell on the road, while some cut open the door of the overturned container. A team of the local police as well as the riot control squad had to be deployed to restore order," an official said.
While some villagers returned the goods on the appeal of the police, many did not, after which teams searched the nearby areas to get people to return what they had taken from the truck, he said.
"Items worth ₹ 70 lakh may have been looted and we have so far managed to retrieve 40 per cent of them. The operation to get more people to give back what they have taken is underway," senior police official Motichand Rathod said.