Bengaluru: Techie returns to burgled home & dead burglar

BENGALURU: It was a scene straight from a thriller film. A Bengaluru-based couple returned from Amsterdam to find that they could not enter their house in Indiranagar. It had been locked from the inside. Same with the back door, reports Rajiv Kalkod.
Sensing trouble, Sridhar Sumant Roy alerted the police and a private security agency, which had been entrusted with patrolling the area. Cops broke open the door and found the house was ransacked. The puja room too was locked from inside. Baffled, the cops peeped in and found a man hanging inside! CCTV footage revealed that the suspected burglar had lived in the house for two days, eating, bathing and sleeping.
A stranger found dead in the puja room of your house! How would you react to that?
If the very thought is sending shivers down your spine, hold on. A city-based couple actually experienced that on Thursday night when they came back from Amsterdam. "I never imagined a man dead in my house, how could this happen," Sridhar Sumant Roy, a techie, asked police who entered the house along with him.
The bizarre incident happened in Indiranagar's Eshwara Layout when Roy and his wife, a private company employee, returned from the foreign trip.
He tried to open the main door using the key, but it did not open. Wondering what could have gone wrong with the lock, he walked towards the back door but found it tampered with. His effort to enter through that door also turned futile as it seemed to have been bolted from inside.
Found dead in puja room
Suspecting foul play, he alerted the police control room and a private security agency, which had been entrusted with patrolling the area. Within a few minutes, Hoysala patrol unit cops landed at the spot and broke open the door. On entering, they found the puja room locked from inside. Baffled, the cops peeped in and found a man hanging inside!
They broke open the door and brought the man's body down. The turn of events left the couple shocked even as the cops went into a tizzy. "We asked the husband and wife how the man had gained entry and they said they didn't know who he was," cops said. A study of CCTV footage revealed the man, suspected to be a burglar, broke into the house through the back door on Wednesday around 10.30pm when the city was battered by heavy rain. The house neither had security guards nor dogs.
The house was ransacked, indicating that the man had searched for valuables like gold and silver. However, his search ended on finding a whiskey bottle in a bedroom and he reportedly downed a few pegs. Further, he emptied snacks that were kept in the refrigerator before sleeping in the bedroom. On Thursday morning, he had a shower and downed a few more pegs. But by evening, he chose to end his life inside the puja room.
The next big question is: Who was the dead man? Based on his fingerprints, police flipped the pages of their crime records and identified the deceased as Dileep Kumar, 46, a native of Assam. The records showed that Jeevan Bima Nagar police had, in 2016, arrested Kumar on house-theft charges. He had given his home address as Kodigehalli then. However, when police visited the house on Friday, they learnt that Kumar had vacated it a few years ago.
Why he ended his life is a million-dollar question, say police officials. "We have investigated cases where burglars cooked food and ate it inside the houses they broke into. Long ago, one such burglar had the habit of using the toilets of houses he burgled with a belief that such an act would save him from police radar. But a thief dying by suicide in a house, that too after spending almost a day, is something unheard of," an investigating officer said.
Cops trying to trace kin
"We are making every effort to trace his family and carry out postmortem. This is a strange incident," deputy commissioner of police (east) Bheemashankar Guled said, adding: "The house owner had returned from Europe when he found the back door broken. Also, he claims he heard some noise inside the house and then called the police control room," Guled said.