Authorities in northern India's city of Mathura, in Uttar Pradesh, say rats are the reason that hundreds of pounds of cannabis went missing after police were asked to provide cannabis seized from suspected drug dealers and stored as evidence.
Court documents showed that police were asked to provide hundreds of pounds of cannabis that was taken as evidence to use as evidence in a recent case.
When police couldn't come up with the evidence that was said to have been stored in police warehouses, they blamed rats for eating the cannabis.
A court in the area said, “Rats are small animals, and they aren’t scared of the police.”
A court document said, “There’s a rat menace in almost all police stations. Hence, necessary arrangements need to be made to safeguard the cannabis that’s been confiscated.”
And it wasn't the first time police blamed rats for missing cannabis in evidence warehouses. A court said Mathura police blamed rats for over 1,000 pounds of missing cannabis allegedly seized in various cases.
CNN reported that after a court hearing, Mathura City Police Superintendent Martand Prakash Singh even disagreed with blaming the rats saying the cannabis was “destroyed by rains and flooding.”
Singh told CNN, “There was no reference to rats in the (court's report) … the police only mentioned that the seized cannabis was destroyed in the rains and flooding.”
