2023-07-15 16:45:52
Authorities of the Ministry of the Interior (Minint) in the central Cuban city of Sancti Spíritus, arrested, in a recent operation, several citizens who had stolen tons of flour, rice, beans and salt, using a technique that seemed to the officialdom ” sui generis”, the use of a jigsaw.
A report from diary Escambray, a local from Sancti Spiritus, pointed out that the detained men were the stevedores who had to keep watch in the back of the truck that transported these products to the state-owned warehouses and bakeries. But with a piece of plastic tube regarding 15 centimeters long, cut chamfered at one end, they would break part of the sack and take out “pounds and pounds of a product”.
Subsequently, they restored the open hole in the bag, through which they removed the product, and they repeated it several times. Then they resold it on the black market, however, in bakeries in the Cabaiguán municipality of Spiritus, a shortage of 34.76 kilograms of wheat flour was found, which was equivalent to 500 units of bread that were no longer made for the people’s consumption.
How did they do the thefts and who did them?
Forces from the Minint pointed out that these are not the only cases and that they have videos of stevedores together with storekeepers, improperly keeping state products, using this technique.
“It has been the storekeepers themselves who have come to an agreement with the stevedores who work inside these establishments to commit the crime (…) in the videos that we have as evidence, you can see how a person penetrates the sacks of rice, beans and flour of wheat in front of the rest of the workers and no one is acting to prevent it”, explained an official.
He also specified that “the bag that has already been pierced is the one that is mounted on the truck to be transferred to the warehouse and the one that has not been adulterated is left in the warehouse, so that, if an inspection arrives, it does not detect any anomaly. The idea is that the shortage is never in the warehouse; but they pass it to the warehouse”.
The thieves take advantage of the fact that in times of transport and fuel crises, no storekeeper is going to claim anything from the central warehouse, for receiving a low-weight sack, as directed. The ages of the detainees are between 20 and 50 years old, and in most cases they are “storekeepers, stevedores, specialists and custodians.”
They specify that it is “a criminal chain” organized from the warehouses, going through the transportation, distribution and commercialization of the product on the black market, paying the people, who suffer “the poor quality of the bread that almost never has the established weight.”
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