A tourist bus in Western Australia appeared to have been targeted for fuel theft. The tank someone opened, police said, contained sewage.
The incident was reported in Laverton in January 2016. Its comic retellings often sound more certain than the evidence described at the time.
What police found
The Kalgoorlie Miner’s contemporary report quoted Senior Sergeant Heath Soutar about a parked tour bus whose waste tank had been accessed.
The discarded cap and absence of missing fuel led police to infer an attempted siphoning mistake. Soutar joked about a hasty retreat and the lack of police interest in recovering the waste.
The original account did not establish a filmed sequence of the suspects drinking sewage. That detail became a confident assertion in some later headlines, although it was an inference in the police description.
An old incident with an enduring punchline
The date matters when the story resurfaces. It concerns a report from 2016, rather than a newly documented case.
The supported account remains unusual enough: a bus was tampered with, its fuel apparently remained untouched and police suspected that someone had selected the wrong tank. The suspects’ precise actions and experience were not independently established in the reporting reviewed.