Bhubaneswar: Except for a short CCTV footage of the SBI ATM at Indira Colony in Lingipur area, on the outskirts of Bhubaneswar, police had no clue about the masked robbers, who uprooted the cash dispensing machine weighing more than three quintals using gas cutters on the intervening night of April 4 and 5.
The miscreants had immediately delinked the CCTV cameras installed at the kiosk and carried the machine in a stolen vehicle to Daya river bed before decamping with over Rs 20.30 lakh.
The search took Commissionerate Police to various hotels in the city and they found that four of the accused had arrived in the city 15 to 20 days in advance while two others reached here on April 2. The CCTV footage and SARAI App confirmed the involvement of five Bangladesh nationals in the Lingipur ATM loot case. But still, the information was not enough to track them down.
“We examined the modus operandi of the ATM loot and looked into similar crimes reported elsewhere in the country. Delhi Police had arrested a gang of criminals, including 3 Bangladeshi nationals, who executed such an ATM loot in Goa on October 23, 2021,” Commissioner of Police Saumendra Priyadarshi said.
The robbers arrested by the Delhi Police helped the cops in Bhubaneswar ascertain the identities of those involved in the Bhubaneswar ATM loot. They tracked their mobile phones and got to know that they had visited Andhra Pradesh before moving to Bengaluru. A team led by Special Squad ACP Sanjeev Satpathy then left for Bengaluru on April 10.
After searching 30 hotels, they managed to nab Khokan Molla (35) of Bangladesh, Mijanur Rehaman Molla of West Bengal. Khokan had been staying in West Bengal’s Murshidabad. Five mobile phones were seized from them.
Four other accused, suspected to be Bangledesh nationals, are absconding.
The accused also managed to transfer the entire stolen money to Bangladesh with the help of their associates. “We will take them on remand for further interrogation and to ascertain how they entered India from Bangladesh,” Priyadarshi said.
