Ghaziabad: The "yellow slip" gang appeared to have struck again, this time in Vijay Nagar's Pratap Vihar, where a man robbed cash and jewellery worth Rs 4 lakh from the house of a private firm employee on Monday afternoon.
The owner of the house, Nikhil Dixit, a 43-year-old lab-testing manager with a footwear company in Faridabad, was away at work when the
robbery occurred. His schoolteacher wife Sikha (38) was also not at home. Nikhil's mother was at her eldest son's home, a few hundred metres away from the house that was raided.
According to police records, Monday's was the fourth such crime in the area. But locals said at least six robberies with similar modus operandi had taken place in the past one-and-a-half months.
Similar to robberies in the past, a man on Monday approached 76-year-old Nirmal Dixit, Nikhil's mother, while she was at her eldest son's home with one of her granddaughters. The man reportedly told the elderly woman that he had been sent by Nikhil to collect a "yellow slip" kept in his house, which was locked.
Before the woman could sense any foul play, the man rushed to a shelf where the keys to Nikhil's house were kept and rushed to the locked building, located four houses away. The elderly woman's 13-year-old granddaughter followed the man to Nikhil's house but he had started breaking the locks of the cupboards by then. The girl apparently asked the man why he felt the need to break the locks, but he persuaded her to keep an eye on his bike outside to prevent her from raising an alarm.
"The man had done his homework well. He stole ornaments from places where no one other than my wife knew that they had been kept there. He knew the whereabouts of each member of the house and even touched the feet of my mother," Nikhil told TOI.
Nikhil's wife Sikha, a teacher at a private school in Ghaziabad, and their two children had gone to a relative's place in Hapur. After the robber fled the house, the elderly woman called up his eldest son, who in turn contacted Nikhil to enquire about the person whom he had reportedly sent to collect the "yellow slip".
"I got a shock after hearing about this. I had heard about such crimes in the locality, but could not believe it would happen to me," Nikhil said.
On December 9, a youth allegedly knocked on a Janta flat in Pratap Vihar and told a 75-year-old woman there that police had detained her daughter-in-law, a teacher at a local school, in a bribery case. He then told her that he needed to hide certain documents in the cupboard from the cops. A similar crime occurred in Pratap Vihar on November 27
Vijay Nagar SHO, Naresh Kumar Singh, said, "Residents should not allow such people inside their homes. They should either call their relatives to confirm whether they have sent a person to collect any document or inform the police. We have issued two numbers — 9643322918 and 9557663956 — for alerting cops."
