Recently, a truck from a logistics company in Shandong overturned and fell off a bridge in Qufu, with more than ten tons of frozen goods looted by villagers, resulting in a loss of over four hundred thousand yuan (RMB, the same below).
On July 28th, Mr. Ji, the person in charge of the logistics company, told Langchao News that on July 24th, a truck from their company was loaded with pig trotters, chicken legs, chocolates, and other frozen goods, departing from Linyi, Shandong, with a plan to transport them to Chengdu, Sichuan. Around 11 p.m. that night, the truck had an accident on the G1511 Rido East Expressway Qufu section, overturning from an overpass, scattering goods everywhere, and the driver being injured and hospitalized.
Mr. Ji mentioned that they immediately arranged for other trucks for transferring the goods and assigned five to six people to guard the scene because the traffic police needed to survey the site before starting the transfer of goods, which didn’t begin until around 10 a.m. on the 25th.
Since the scattered goods were hundreds of meters away from the nearby road, the workers had to manually move them using small carts. Throughout the process, some villagers came over one after another to watch.
One of the workers, Mr. Hu, who was handling the goods on-site, said that the looting occurred in two waves: it started with a smaller number of people around 2 p.m. and escalated in the evening around 6 p.m. when dozens of villagers rushed in for a large-scale looting.
“Those who looted were mostly elderly, but there were also middle-aged and young people. They came with woven bags and rode electric tricycles to carry things. At first, some grabbed damaged and scattered frozen products, but later on, they simply took whole boxes directly,” said Mr. Hu, adding that he and his colleagues tried to stop them but to no avail. “We chased them to the east, they robbed from the west; we chased them to the south, they went to the north – circling around to loot.”
Videos from the scene showed that the police intervened and even used pepper spray to warn the villagers, but they remained undeterred.
“After the persuasion failed, the officers from the police station just stood there doing nothing, and the villagers became even more shameless,” according to Mr. Ji’s estimate, over ten tons of frozen products were looted and damaged, resulting in a loss of over four hundred thousand yuan, with not a single person caught until now.
On July 28th, Xizhou Police Station confirmed that dozens of villagers were involved in the incident, and the investigation is still ongoing with no arrests made.
The police personnel mentioned that at the time, only two police officers were dispatched to the scene and used police equipment, but due to the overwhelming number of looters, the situation was difficult to control.
The incident has sparked discussions online. Netizens expressed their dismay, saying, “In the land of Confucius, such shameless acts have occurred, a real moral decline, truly sad.” “Confucius and Mencius have long gone, and the virtues of propriety, righteousness, honesty, and honor are no longer upheld.” “Regardless of the province, similar news can be found aplenty.”
Some netizens raised questions, “If stopping them is difficult, filming them shouldn’t be hard, right? In today’s era with advanced facial recognition technology, it should be easy to hold each one accountable afterward, which can serve as a deterrent and a warning.” “Because they are looting public property, try touching something that belongs to the government, and even a hundred people would be caught.”