Many gunny sacks full of the stolen spare parts were recovered. (Representational)
The Railways on Saturday said that seven people have been arrested in connection with the theft of spare parts of an engine from a yard in Bihar and "95 per cent of the stolen items have been recovered".
East Central Railway's Chief Public Relations Officer Birendra Kumar issued a statement to the effect and clarified "no tunnel had been dug" by the "petty thieves" close to the yard in Barauni though he said they "might have sneaked through huge cracks in the decrepit boundary wall".
The CPRO also insisted that the reported "stealth of an entire diesel engine" was "not humanly possible" and the thieves had decamped with "copper cable of a traction motor inside".
Notably, the matter had come to light when many gunny sacks full of the stolen spare parts were recovered from a scrap godown at Muzaffarpur during a joint search operation carried out by the state police, its vigilance wing, the GRP and the RPF.
An RPF official had told reporters in Muzaffarpur on Friday that the search operation was conducted in pursuance of an FIR lodged at Barauni "a week ago, regarding the stealth of an entire diesel engine, which was dismantled part by part".
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)