The South Korean police have arrested six people for carrying out an insane heist in Cheonan City, South Chungcheong Province.
According to reports on September 5, the Daejeon Metropolitan Police arrested three suspects and three accomplices for digging a secret tunnel to steal oil from a public pipeline. The culprits had rented a two-story warehouse in Cheonan in February and spent the last four months digging a tunnel underneath.
To conceal their actual plan, the suspects turned the warehouse into a logistics center and started digging from inside a room disguised to look like cold storage. The group also had plans to sell the stolen oil. They already rented a gas station where the oil was supposed to be stored and sold.
Investigators believe that the mastermind behind this plan was one of the suspects, a 55-year-old ex-convict who was recently released from prison for a similar offense. It is possible that he recruited all the accomplices, which included a technician to install the equipment necessary to steal the oil, a site manager, a money handler, and a tunnel digger.
They dug the tunnel 4 meters underground, 75 centimeters wide, 90 centimeters high, and 16.8 meters across. When the police discovered the crime scene, they were only 9 meters away from reaching the target pipeline. This absurd heist was uncovered after the police received a tip-off.
According to a police official, the tunnel was located right beneath a four-lane road in a densely populated area, which created a significant risk of ground collapse. However, the tunnel has now been fully restored, eliminating any further threat to civilian life or infrastructure.
Source: The Korea Herald
