Published: Sunday April 19, 2009 MYT 12:15:00 PM
Updated: Sunday April 19, 2009 MYT 12:16:34 PM
Plantation workers nabbed for staging hijacking, robbery
By STEPHEN THEN
MIRI: Three palm-oil plantation workers in the rural sub-district of Niah have been arrested for staging a hijacking and robbery of a cargo truck belonging to their company.
The three men, aged in their 30s, were arrested by the Miri police on Saturday.
One of the three, who was a driver for the company, had last Wednesday lodged a police report claiming that he was robbed and beaten up by a group of armed robbers while delivering a cargo assignment from Batu Niah to Bintulu.
He claimed that his truck, laden with harvest and fertilisers, was hijacked by the bandits after he was beaten up and abandoned along the Sarawak Second Coastal Highway some 120kms south of here.
In the course of their investigation, Miri police found details that were deemed suspicious.
The police suspected that the driver could have tried to capitalise on the fears of armed robberies and hijackings along the highway to allegedly stage his own coup so that he could cheat his company management of the vehicle and the cargo, worth more than RM100,000.
Police investigators arrested the driver and two other workers who are believed to have assisted him in carrying out the fake robbery after a probe with the company management.
Miri police chief Asst Comm Jamaluddin Ibrahim confirmed the arrests.
“The suspects will be charged with lodging a false police report. We recovered the truck and the cargo after interrogating them,” he said.
The entire stretch of the 220km-long highway between Miri and Bintulu is dotted by huge oil-palm estates, some of them measuring up to 20,000 hectares in size.
The highway had last year notched up a reputation as the “highway of fear” following a series of armed robberies and hijackings involving gas tankers, cargo trucks and civilian vehicles.
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