THIEVES broke into 12 buses making off with the vehicles’ sizeable batteries in an overnight raid in Ringwood.

An unknown number of offenders targeted Morebus buses at the depot at West Street sometime between Wednesday evening and Thursday morning.

It is not yet known how many offenders were involved.

However each battery - believed to be around three times the size of a car battery - was very heavy.

The incident meant that Morebus was unable to send any buses from its depot for around 15 minutes while they urgently sourced batteries from elsewhere.

In a tweet the company said: “Due to unforeseen circumstances, we are unable to run most services from our Ringwood depot. Some services will be delayed or cancelled as a result. We are sending replacement buses to cover routes as quickly as possible and are working hard to minimise delay. Apologies.”

Very soon afterwards the company confirmed that, with the exception of the X3 service, they were able to get most services back up and running to their normal schedule.

Operations director Ed Wills said: “We had 12 sets of batteries stolen overnight from our Ringwood depot, so our buses could not be moved.

“Police are investigating and we would ask the public to look out for anyone trying to sell batteries which are large, as there is little other application they could be used for.

“We would like to apologise to our customers for any inconvenience this has caused.

“Our team has acted swiftly to bring in replacement batteries (and vehicles), which have come from other depots, and all services are now running.”

The company later tweeted: “Well done to all of our staff this morning who managed to keep our services running despite an earlier vandalism incident #dreamteam.”

A spokesperson for Hampshire Police said the incident occurred sometime between 11pm on Wednesday and 5am yesterday. Anyone with information is asked to call 101 quoting reference 44170117789.