Two Nepalese men have been arrested hiding in the drug at the departmental store they had burgled in north Delhi’s Roop Nagar in the early hours on Sunday, police said.

Police said the two-storey departmental store is one of the 75 franchise shops of a private pharmaceutical company, Sanyog healthcare limited. Each store is covered by CCTV cameras and the company has a centralised CCTV footage monitoring control room in Nangloi. Two operators monitor the live video footage of all the stores round-the-clock.

Additional deputy commissioner of police Jasmeet Singh said the raid was conducted after the pharmaceutical company’s control room operator saw two men in the locked Roop Nagar’s departmental store and called the police control room. The inspector (investigation) of the Roop Nagar police station, who was on night patrolling duty, immediately formed a team and rushed to the store.

“The team raided the store and caught the two burglars. Both of them are from Nepal. They hid themselves at different places on the first floor of the store when the raiding team members announced the they had surrounded the store and asked them to surrender. The burglars had even broken the cash box,” said the additional DCP.

Shashwat Sharma, general manager of Sanyog healthcare limited, said that he reached the departmental store around 4am after receiving a call about the break-in. Sharma said that the inspector, who was leading the raiding party, broke open the glass door and went to the first floor with his team members, who were carrying firearms and sticks.

“We found one burglar hiding behind a wooden temple. He identified himself as Surender Bahadur,27. He guided us to the iron rack where his associate, Ram Singh,30, had hidden himself in a carton box,” said a police officer, who was part of the operation.

The officer said that apart from some house breaking equipments, they also recovered around R60,000 from the arrested men, which they had stolen from the cash box. Police said Ram Singh was last arrested in a similar case registered in east Delhi’s Krishna Nagar police station in 2004. After his released from jail, Singh returned to Nepal.

“The duo told the police that they came to Delhi around two months ago in search of job. When they could not find a job, the two decided to burgle a shop. However, their luck ran out as they chose a shop that is secured by around 30 CCTVs having a 24x7 live feed monitoring control room in Nangloi,” the officer added.

First Published: Nov 19, 2018 14:33 IST