BHOPAL: Around 1500 brand new iPhones worth almost Rs 12 crore, a part of a big consignment of smartphones of the Apple Inc, have been looted from a container truck in Madhya Pradesh’s Sagar district, police said on Saturday.
Eight teams have been constituted to crack the crime at the earliest, Sagar district police superintendent Vikas Kumar Sahwal said. Investigations into the robbery of the iPhones have prima facie established the role of a security personnel, named Warish, who is untraceable since the August 15 incident, police said.
The security personnel, who has gone missing mysteriously since the incident, belongs to Haryana’s Palwal. He was hired by the multinational company without police verification.
“The ongoing investigations have established the role of the untraceable security personnel, who surprisingly was hired without any prior police verification. A case of burglary has been registered against the untraceable security man and investigations are underway,” SP Sahwal said.
The driver of the truck, who alleged that he was drugged and subsequently tied with ropes by the looters, too belongs to the Mewat region of Haryana and Rajasthan.
The incident happened as the container truck carrying consignment of the brand new iPhones from the manufacturing unit in Tamil Nadu was passing through Madhya Pradesh’s Seoni, Narsinghpur and Sagar districts on way to northern India. The driver alleged that on August 15 night while the truck was passing through MP, the security personnel accompanying him from Tamil Nadu boarded someone else on the truck, saying that he was known to him. The driver alleged that he was later drugged in the tea.
“I fell unconscious and on gaining consciousness found myself tied with the ropes inside the driver’s cabin,” he told the police. Later, it was found that out of the 4,000 brand new iPhones around 1,500 were missing from the truck. The driver subsequently reported the matter to the Lakhnadon police in Seoni, but couldn’t get help. He later reported the matter at Bandari police station in Sagar, but the FIR wasn’t lodged.
The robbery was then reported by the company’s senior officials to MP police, after which three staff members of Bandari police station were attached to the district police line for not acting timely in the matter. “The FIR was registered on Saturday,”said the SP.