Filling station accused of tampering with pumps
A state-owned filling station in the capital's Poribagh was shut down for several hours yesterday after some 50 customers laid siege to it alleging that it was selling short measures of petrol by tampering with a dispenser.
Meghna Model Service Centre was shut from around noon and opened with police assistance around 6:00pm. During the agitation, police took away its in-charge, Md Mahbubun Nur, to Shahbagh Police Station around 2:20pm.
Mohammad Ali, the motorcyclist who started the agitation, said for several weeks it felt like his two-wheeler's mileage dropped whenever he refilled there.
“I have asked them several times to get a BSTI-approved pot or something to prove that they are not cheating...But they always say that they do not have any pot,” he told The Daily Star.
Ali said yesterday he brought a five-litre capacity jar approved by the Bangladesh Standards and Testing Institution (BSTI) and asked the salesperson to pour petrol in it.
“Seeing the jar, they first said they could not give petrol because of load shedding, and after a while they said they ran out of fuel,” he said.
Ali fears that the station authorities had been stealing around two litres from every 10 litres customers bought.
Md Mahbubun Nur said, “It was sheer bad luck that we ran out of fuel when we needed to prove that our measurement was flawless.”
Nur also claimed that a loaded tanker had arrived around 40 minutes after the agitation started but could not enter for the “angry mob”. “They (customers) kept saying that we would have to give them fuel without touching the machines,” he said.
Asked how often they ran out of fuel, Nur said it was the third time in the last one year.
Comments