NEW DELHI: On July 5, armed men had struck at the house of an elderly businessmen in Preet Vihar, held the family captive, and looted cash and jewellery worth several lakhs. Twenty days later, the same men landed up at another businessman’s house in east Delhi.
They were less lucky this time as a police patrol intercepted them. They shot a policeman in the chest, but when he fired back, they had to abort their plan and flee. The trail they left behind led to their eventual capture.
Six of those men were arrested, said joint CP (east) Ravindra Yadav. Turns out all are Bangladeshis and involved in several crimes.
DCP (east) Pankaj Singh said three teams comprising inspectors Maninder Singh, Videsh Singhal and D P Singh and led by ACP Rakesh Dixit were formed. One team found a bag belonging to the assailants from a forest along railway tracks. The bag had been dropped in the crossfire with the injured officer, sub-inspector Lokesh Sharma.
The first to be trapped by the police was one Ikram from near the Kanpur railway station. He led the police to his aides Islam and Sohail. Police then conducted raids in Ghaziabad and Delhi and arrested three others—Salim, Suttan and Haroon. Two country-made pistols, cartridges, gold jewellery, cellphones, knives and other tools used to break into houses were seized from them. A passport belonging to one of the men was seized along with the Aadhaar card of Ikram.
“During interrogation, Ikram said he had lived in Mandawali during childhood where his father worked as a scrap vendor. He had developed a good knowledge of Delhi. He got in touch with other Bangladeshi men in both Delhi and in Bangladesh and teamed up with some of them to form a
gang,” DCP Singh said.
Police said all of them belong to Khulna and nearby districts of Barisal in Bangladesh. They are between 30 and 40 and have been committing crimes in Delhi for a decade. They targeted houses near railway tracks so that they could flee with ease.
The gang would commit several crimes within a span of a couple of months and then lie low for a few months to dodge the police. This was their cooling off period that they would spend either in Bangladesh or in another Indian state where they committed robberies again. Police found them to be involved in some multi-crore robberies in Kerala and Karnataka (Bangalore).
Sub-inspector Sharma would be awarded Asadharan Karya Puraskar for displaying exemplary gallantry in taking on armed criminals and foiling their plans, joint CP Yadav said.
Illustration for representational purpose.
