MADINAH, 4 June  — Security officers recently arrested a Saudi driver for illegally selling goods he was carrying in a large truck. He claimed that his employer was not paying his salary.

Workers along the Hijrah Road in Madinah said the man parked the truck and offered to sell them its consignment of radiator coolant at half the normal price, Al-Bilad newspaper reported yesterday. He told them that he was selling the coolant at a discount because the bottles were damaged.

A highway patrol unit saw the large crowd around the truck buying the bottles. They questioned the truck driver after they grew suspicious about his behavior.

The driver confessed to the police that he was selling the bottles for his upkeep because he had not received his salary.

Police contacted the man’s employer who arrived on the scene together with a relative of the driver. The employer told the police that the driver was mentally disturbed and had been discharged from the Taif Mental Hospital only two months ago, the paper said.

In Taif, meanwhile, a truck carrying a large quantity of foodstuffs, including sweets and pastries, was involved in an accident on Saturday. The truck driver was shocked when he found out that his expensive cargo had putrefied due to the long delay in transporting it caused by the accident.

A car driver who was responsible for the accident had already fled the scene, Al-Riyadh daily said in a report yesterday.

Oil tanker catches fire: In Bisha, an oil tanker caught fire while it was unloading at a petrol station. The fire consumed the truck and a container parked nearby before Civil Defense officers reached the site to put out the fire, Al-Riyadh said.

The daily said in another report that a Jordanian truck driver died on Friday when his vehicle hit a pipeline along the international highway near Owaiqela. Sameeh Ibrahim was driving the truck from the United Arab Emirates to the Kingdom.