Ganjam:
A stolen JCB, a string of police barricades and a chase that stretched across four police station limits, that is how Friday night played out in Odisha’s Ganjam district.
Police first received word of a JCB theft in the Khallikote police station area on August 14. What followed was an extended pursuit, with teams from four different police stations, Khallikote, Rambha, Purushottampur and Kabisuryanagar, joining forces to try and stop the stolen vehicle.
JCBs are not built for speed, but that did not stop the suspect behind the wheel. Officers set up barricades at several points along the route in an attempt to halt the vehicle, but the suspect drove at high speed and broke through the roadblocks one after another, repeatedly slipping past police attempts to intercept him.
Videos showing the chase, with the JCB speeding past barricades, have since surfaced on social media and drawn attention from users online.
Man Drives Stolen JCB Through Police Barricades; Dramatic Chase Caught on Camera! pic.twitter.com/sKAsuNJTx6
— NDTV (@ndtv) August 19, 2026
The pursuit eventually reached Gudiali, within the limits of Kabisuryanagar police station, where the suspect left the JCB in an agricultural field before fleeing the scene on foot.
Police later recovered the abandoned vehicle and launched a search operation to trace the suspect. Investigators are now looking into how the theft took place and piecing together the exact sequence of events during the chase.
Purushottampur SDPO Sujit Kumar Nayak confirmed that the suspect remains at large. Further investigation into the case is underway.
With inputs from Dev Kumar Ghosh
