Strange incident in Glasgow

I used to live in a glasgow area called Toryglen and one night in mid 2005 I was walking down to my local Asda (British walmart) on a main road in the middle of the night (can't remember the exact date) and saw police officers in the middle of the road (there is hardly any traffic in the middle of the night on that road) and they had put a small police cordon in the middle of the road, in the middle of the cordon was some kind of camera on a tripod shining down on something really wierd, it was hard to make out, looked like silvery debris and it was sparkling, I remember there was a strange burning smell in the air and I asked a policeman what was going on, there were police wandering round in nearby bushes, his reply was "that is what we are trying to find out", I walked on my way and when I got back to the same stretch of the road (I was only gone about 10 mins and you can see the supermarket in the distance from that stretch in the road) it was as if nothing ever happened, no sign of anyone or anything

Any idea of what it could be? Why would the police have a camera and a beam on this debris?