More than 200kg worth of products lootedby local mobs shortly after spilling out from a burning truck in south-central Vietnam earlier this week have been retrieved, police said Thursday.

The truck was transporting household goods on Tuesday from Ho Chi Minh City to a supermarket in Quy Nhon City, the capital of Binh Dinh Province, when it suddenly caught fire.

As its merchandise poured from the burning trailer, a mob of local residents rushed to loot the goods, despite desperate cries from the poor driver.

A passer-by filmed the entire looting scene and posted three different videos to her Facebook, helping police identify the looters, most of whom are residents of the city’s Ghenh Rang Ward and nearby Xuan Hai Commune in the neighboring province of Phu Yen.

Police have summoned the identified looters and asked them to return the goods. As of Thursday afternoon, some 200kg of looted items, including cooking pots, infrared cookers, fish sauce, and detergent, have been returned to Ghenh Rang police.

“Most of the returned products were burned in the fire and are now unusable,” Huynh Du Phi Long, deputy head of the Quy Nhon police department, admitted to Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper.

Long said many of the looters confessed that they only took the goods under the assumption that they could not be sold since they were burned.

“This shallow thought led to ugly behavior when people rushed in to loot the goods,” the police officer said.

Despite condemnation, police still chose to tolerate the misbehavior rather than penalize the looters, Long added.

“We only reprimanded looters and requested that they refrain from repeating their ugly actions which have damaged the image of the Binh Dinh people,” he said.

“There are no civil fines or criminal charges being levied in this incident.”

Long also said initial reports show that the truck caught fire due to a short circuit in the overheated cabin.

The driver and his assistant managed to leave the vehicle in time, but all important papers and receipts relating to the goods were completely destroyed in the fire.

In December 2013, hoards of people rushed an overturned truck to loot hundreds of beer cans in the southern city of Bien Hoa. In July the following year, two men involved in the looting were sentenced to six months each in prison for “publicly appropriating property."

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