PATNA: Unidentified thieves looted Rs 3.5 lakh from an ATM machine at Dudhpura Bazaar under
Hasanpur police station in
Samastipur district on Sunday. The ATM machine was of India1 which is owned by a private firm that provides ATM transaction facility only.
Police sources said that the criminals entered inside the ATM kiosk after breaking the shutter following which they tried to rip apart the ATM machine in an attempt to loot money. However they failed to cut open the machine completely following which they fled with the iron chest which stores the money inside the machine.
Rosra
SDPO Ajeet Kumar said the incident took place between 3am to 4.30am. "The police patrolling party was near the spot upto 3am. Till then no suspicious movement was spotted," he said.
He said that the officials who run the ATM machine had informed police that altogether Rs 3.5 lakh was stolen by thieves. He said that the thieves had taken out the iron chest from the side of the ATM machine.
"No marks of using of gas cutter was found on the machine during preliminary investigation. It seems the thieves used heavy equipment to rip it apart," the SDPO said.
He said that the CCTV cameras installed inside the kiosk and inside the machine was also sabotaged by the thieves but the hard drive was safe. "Experts were called to extract the video footage of the incident from the hard drive," the SDPO said.
He said that several weeks back, thieves had attempted to break open an ATM machine of
State Bank of India in the Hasanpur area in which they had failed.
ATM machines have turned into soft target of criminals and thieves in the state in last couple of years. Several incidents were reported in which money was looted from ATM machine after cutting or uprooting it. More than half a dozen incidents of ATM loot were reported for Muzaffarpur and
Vaishali district alone in last several months.
