Suri: Over 1,000 residents of a Birbhum village blocked National Highway 60 and confined the officer-in-charge of the local police station to a club for five hours after gold and silver ornaments worth around Rs 30 lakh were stolen from two century-old Kali temples on Diwali night.

Residents of Chinpai village in Birbhum’s Sadaipur also ransacked a police van before manhandling OC Abdur Rob Khan.

The 6 am blockade on the highway, which links Odisha’s Balasore to Morgram in Murshidabad, was lifted after five hours when the police assured the protesters that the OC would be suspended and a CID probe into the thefts launched.

The police also promised to recover the ornaments within 24 hours.

The villagers alleged that the local police, led by Khan, had stopped a cultural programme and switched off the decorative lights at the two Kali temples, located within metres of each other, past Wednesday midnight.

They alleged that Khan had assured them that two civic police volunteers would guard the temples at night.

Villagers who came to the Kali temples early on Thursday saw the locks of the doors broken and the ornaments brought to adorn the Kali idols stolen. A resident spotted the broken donation box of one of the temples lying metres away.

Thousands of devotees from in and around the village flock to the Siddheswari Kali temples during Kali Puja.