Pathanamthitta: Adoor Police have busted an inter-state gang of thieves who use long-distance trains to commute and target business establishments.|
The accused - Rahul Singh (29), his brother Om Prakash (51), and Ankur (29) of Uttar Pradesh - broke into the Karikkineth Silk Galleria, a textile shop in Adoor Town, last month and stole cash and other valuables worth Rs 3 lakh.
According to police, the accused entered the textile shop by breaking open its roof on October 18 at midnight. They used the pipelines on the rear side of the building to climb to the roof. Then, they drilled open the wall and entered the shop. The gang left the shop within a few hours with the cash kept inside a vault along with some clothes, said a police officer.
The theft came to light when the shop reopened the next morning. A team led by the Adoor DySP R Jayaraj inspected the scene and booked a case. A police team scanned the CCTV footage from the shop and in the neighbourhood. On verifying the visuals, the police concluded that the thieves were not South Indians. A follow-up investigation revealed that the gang had gone to Kollam after the theft.
An extensive search was taken out across the Kollam and Thiruvananthapuram districts, though to no avail. The police found that the thieves stayed in a lodge near the Kollam Railway Station. However, their address was incomplete and the phone number they gave was inactive. The police traced the accused's original location to the UP belt and discovered that they had been travelling by trains to different parts of the country.
The sleuths later traced their current location to Puliyangudi in Tamil Nadu and recorded the arrest. “The accused used to turn off their phones before reaching the targeted location and kept moving for days on end after each theft. Hence, it was very difficult for the investigators to trace their location,” the official added.
The gang targeted clothing stores knowing that extra money would be kept inside such shops after the evening business. They located shops using Google and carefully observed the premises before carrying out a theft, the police said.
Preliminary interrogation of the accused pointed to their role in similar thefts throughout the country. The police suspect their role in the thefts reported in business establishments over the last one-and-a-half year within the police station limits of Kunnamkulam (Thrissur), Kottiyam (Kollam), Wayanad, Sultan Bathery, Kozhikode and Feroke.
Rahul, the kingpin of the racket, used to involve different people in each theft while his brother, Om Prakash, was tasked with identifying and collecting information on various business establishments under the pretext of selling belts.
