Daring thief arrested after managing to steal 800-meter-long road

The man said that hardly anyone ever used the road, so he didn’t think it would be missed

As a way of making some fast cash, one rather daring thief recently managed to steal a road.

On January 24th, residents of a village outside of Suqian city in Jiangsu province noticed that one of their roads had mysteriously vanished overnight. Villagers called in to police, wondering if this had something to do with construction work, however, police checked with the village committee and found that there were no resurfacing plans for the road, China News Service reports.

Arriving at the village, officers were stunned to find that an 800-meter-long stretch of pavement was, in fact, simply no longer there.

Eventually, they were able to track down the culprit, a local man surnamed Zhu, who told police that recently he was a bit bored at home, without much to do, and had been looking for a way of making some quick money when he realized that the answer was right under his feet.

Zhu said that hardly anyone ever used the road, so he decided to dig it up and sell away the raw materials.

In order to do this, Zhu hired a few trucks and an excavator and went to work overnight. The following day, he managed to sell the concrete rubble for 10 yuan a ton, pocketing 5,000 yuan for his trouble.

As insane as this may sound, Zhu is not the first to try to earn some extra pocket change this way. Back in 2015, two thieves managed to steal a 410-meter-long road from another Jiangsu village — also reasoning that no one ever really used the road, anyway.

More recently, a small section of the world’s first solar-powered highway was stolen just five days after opening outside of Jinan, Shandong province. The actual value of the solar panels is relatively low, leading some to suspect that the chunk was taken for a closer peek at the technology underlying the road.

[Images via China News Service]