HYDERABAD: After hitting the jackpot, the Rajendra Nagar duo couldn’t resist itself from having a potluck.
What Mubeen Mohammed and his associate Mohammed Ghouse Pasha, the two masterminds behind the high-profile Nizam Museum theft case, did next was eat like a monarch. With a golden food box encrusted with diamonds and rubies in their kitty, they thought what better way than to enjoy a royal meal.
So, they got packaged food from outside, emptied the contents in the Nizam-era tiffin box and savoured the meal before hiding it in a pit close to a dairy farm in Rajendra Nagar. “The duo has confessed to having food twice from the golden box,” Hyderabad commissioner of police
Anjani Kumar said at a press conference here on Tuesday, after sleuths cracked the case of theft inside the Nizam Museum at Purani Haveli by producing the duo.
Following some crucial leads, task force sleuths apprehended the two thieves — Mubeen, 24, a welder, and Pasha, 23, a centring worker — at
Himayat Sagar on Tuesday. The duo was back in the city on Monday after they failed to find suitable buyers in Mumbai where they had gone to dispose of the booty. “All the stolen objects have been recovered intact and will be returned to the museum soon,” the CP said.
The theft came to light on September 3 after the museum staff found the golden tiffin box, a golden spoon, two cups and saucers belonging to VII Nizam Mir Osman Ali Khan missing.
The duo had set eyes on lifting a gold-coated Quran and some valuable antique items. “But they dropped the idea as early morning prayers were blaring out from a mosque at Purani Haveli at that time,” a police official said.
Forty days prior to committing the offence, the thieves made a recce of the museum on two different occasions and checked out location of CCTV cameras and valuable articles. The thieves used a rope to enter the museum by breaking the ventilator. “They left a masonry mark to measure the rope and that gave us an important lead,” said Anjani Kumar.
The thieves had no clue about the worth of the articles they had stolen. They had even contemplated melting them and later selling them.
