The people of Kannur were shocked by the news of a daylight robbery in a town jewellery on June 8. The Al Fathibi Jewellery near the Pazhayangadi bus stand was robbed of 3 kg gold and Rs 2 lakh by the time the jeweller and his employees returned from the nearby masjid after Friday prayers.
The police were left with very little clues. The robbers had covered the jewellery with a curtain and spray-painted the surveillance cameras before prying open the shutters. There were no eyewitnesses to the robbery. Yet the police nabbed the robbers within 16 days.
The investigators suspected that the heist was masterminded by a local or someone who knew the area very well. Outsiders would not dare to sneak into a jewellery in the town in broad daylight. The police rounded up habitual offenders and jailbirds but they were of no use. Even the surveillance cameras in the area provided little evidence.
The police formed a team of 15 officers led by Thaliparambu deputy superintendent of police K V Venugopal and Pazhayangadi sub-inspector P A Binu Mohan.
Strange colours
Skimming through the reels of surveillance footage, the team members chanced upon a strange-looking two-wheeler. Two men were riding on a black scooter with a white alloy wheel. The rider was wearing a helmet and his companion was carrying an umbrella as if to hide his face.
What piqued the curiosity of the cops was the scooter itself. It was the latest model. It stood out because most of the vehicles were off the road at the time of the Friday prayer.
Usually, black scooters came with black alloy wheels and white ones with white wheels. Why was this strange choice? The police made their queries with the dealers in the showrooms. Even they found it a bit strange. No one opted for such a mixed colour scheme.
Similar heist
Another team was meanwhile looking for any other robberies with similar modus operandi. They fished out a year-old case of a Friday robbery of a jewellery at Mottambram. The robbers had managed to tunnel into the jewellery but they had to drop the plan when a woman spotted them.
Luckily for the police, some of the action was caught on camera. The footage was of low quality. Yet they compared the visuals with the latest one. Both operations were carried out by two men. The body language also suggested that they could be the same duo. The police publicised the footage and received valuable leads about the identity of the people. The police checked the call records of the two suspects. They had not contacted each other.
The trap
When the police asked the suspects, separately, about their whereabouts on June 8, they said that they had gone to the masjid. When the police confronted them with records of their phone tower location near the railway station, they said that they had gone to meet a woman.
The police were suspicious but let them off for want of evidence. The cops told them that they were off the hook but kept on monitoring their mobile phones for possible contact.
The two men did not call each other for two days. On the third day, one of them made a foolish move. He called the other one and shared a secret.
The cops promptly recorded the call and took the duo into custody again. The suspects stood by their story though. The police subjected them to repeated rounds of interrogation. The duo got their facts wrong. They even gave the wrong name for the ustad of the masjid they claimed to have gone to on Friday.
Local lads
The police confronted them with enough evidence to prove that they had not been to the masjid on that Friday. They told them that their claim of meeting a mystery woman was proved to be false. Finally, they played the recorded phone conversation between the two men. The duo knew that their game was over.
The police arrested the duo, Noushad, aged 36, and Rafeek, aged 43. Both of them were known in the locality. Noushad was into interior designing and Rafeek was a retailer. The people in the area were shocked to hear about the identity of the suspects.
Noushad and Rafeek hardly spoke to each other over phone because they met each other every day. They had zeroed in on their target and monitored the area for days. They surveyed the surveillance cameras in the Pazhayangadi and Puthiyangadi areas and deftly evaded them.
The D-day
Noushad and Rafeek parked their car near the railway station two days ahead of the planned robbery. They rode a scooter to the jewellery on Friday, robbed the place and fled on the same scooter. They shifted the booty into the car. One of them drove the car away while the other returned on the scooter.
They had timed the heist well. It was the last Friday of the Ramzan month. The place was largely deserted at the prayer time. They covered the entrance to the jewellery and spray-painted the camera.
The partners made away with the gold and money, carrying the booty in bags and buckets. The duo had even altered the registration plate of the scooter.
The police found the gold and the money from their houses. Rafeek had kept his share in a shelf in his rented house while Noushad had buried it in a plastic cover on the yard of his wife’s house. The police still had a puzzle to solve.
The strange scooter
The scooter the duo was riding on was stolen too. The police found that the scooter was stolen from one A C Siddique from Mattoor on December 5. Noushad and Rafeek had spray-painted the scooter into black but did not bother to blacken the white alloy wheel. They said that they painted the scooter white again after the robbery. They said that they had dumped the scooter into a river. The vehicle was never found.
Noushad and Rafeek were no greenhorns. They had robbed 163 sovereigns of gold in the last five years. They would split the booty equally and hide it for months after the operation.
Their clandestine business was exposed by a team of officers, including district superintendent of police G Siva Vikram, DSP K V Venugopal,SIs P A Binu Mohan, N Dijesh, assistant SIs Jaymon George, Dinesan K V, Kunhiraman, senior civil police officers Manohan K V, Nikesh M P, Shajan, Ramesan K V, civil police officers Jabir P A, Sajeevan K and Rojith Varghese. They were also helped by the SP’s crime squad and the cyber cell.