By Tim Binnall
Police in India arrested an industrious gang of thieves who managed to steal a 60-foot-long bridge that weighed a whopping 550 tons. The shocking caper reportedly occurred last week in the villages of Amiyawar when a group of what appeared to be government workers arrived in the community. Claiming that they had been dispatched from the country's irrigation department, the tricky miscreants spent three days using bulldozers and gas-powered cutting tools to dismantle the decades-old structure.
Since the bridge had fallen into disuse in recent years, residents did not suspect anything was amiss about the job until after the work had finished and word of the incident reached area officials, who quickly realized that structure had been the subject of a rogue removal at the hands of clever-thinking scrap metal thieves. Fortunately, despite being dismantled into much smaller pieces, it would appear that hiding a stolen 60-foot-long bridge turned out to be harder than the task of taking it away as police soon located and arrested eight individuals believed to be behind the heist.
Alas, cops were only able to recover approximately 550 pounds of the stolen steel when they busted the thieves and it is believed that the vast majority of the ill-gotten bridge-building materials had already been sold on the black market. In addition to the ne'er-do-wells who spent days dismantling the bridge, authorities also arrested a government official who happened to call in sick on the day of the heist and is suspected of being the gang's proverbial 'inside man' on the job.