Hunt on for wood smugglers in forest

After going through CCTV footage of the area, the hunt is on for unknown accused suspected to have attacked a forest official in the Tungareshwar forest area. Forest officials said that the accused were wood smugglers who attacked the forest officials’ team when it was on its rounds, grievously injuring one of the members. An official explained that in Tungareshwar forest, smuggling of a specific type of wood was frequent and to put an end to it, local forest officials had increased their routine patrolling in the area.

While patrolling on Friday night, when forest officials were crossing the Satvali area, they stumbled upon a tempo that had 10 to 15 people inside and looked suspicious, so they tried to stop it. However, the tempo driver tried to escape but the forest officials started following the vehicle. On the Mumbai-Ahmedabad highway, suddenly, passengers from the tempo started pelting stones at the forest officials’ jeep. One of the officials, B.S. Dalvi, was taken unawares and underwent 34 stitches near his eyes.

Commenting on the incident, a police official from Virar informed that the police had recovered CCTV footage of the area where these attackers had been spotted so they were now circulating these pictures among their sources to identify the accused. The official informed that they tried to nab the accused through the number plate of their tempo, only to later realise that the accused were using a bogus number plate.