BENGALURU: Rising debts forced a 42-year-old software engineer, who turned businessman and incurred losses, to resort to chain-snatching to tide over his financial woes. While he was successful at that, he has ended up behind bars after HSR Layout police found that he was involved in 12 chain-snatching cases.The accused, Prabhakar T, a resident of Kudlu, was working with a private company before resigning and starting his own offset printing press. He had completed BE in Hyderabad before coming to Bengaluru 15 years ago.
A police officer said, two days ago, Prabhakar managed to snatch a gold chain from a woman and a police constable, Mallappa Walake, who noticed the incident, chased the accused’s two-wheeler to nab him.
He was taken into custody and during interrogation confessed that he was involved in several similar incidents reported in Bommanahalli, Madiwala, Koramangala and HSR Layout. Constable Walake was on a Cheetah patrolling bike on Thursday afternoon. Prabhakar over-sped in a bid of escape from the constable and crashed his bike into a car coming from the opposite direction.
As he fell down, Walake alerted Hoysala staff and Prabhakar was taken to a private hospital for first aid and then brought to the station.Prabhakar, a native of Madanapalli in Andra Pradesh, had come to Bengaluru 15 years ago and worked in a private software company. After a few years, he resigned and started his own business. As he incurred losses in business, he was forced to borrow money, ending up with a debt of `10 lakh, money mainly taken from private lenders as banks rejected his loan applications.
It was to repay this debt that he chose chain-snatching as the quick and easy way out. He found that he was quickly able to repay his debt after a successful run of chain-snatching incidents. But he didn’t stop at that. Although his repayment was almost complete, he chose to continue it as he found it to be an easy way of making money.
His first attempt in Madiwala was successful and then he continued a series of chain- snatching. He continued to borrow money from pawn brokers, selling them gold chains robbed from victims. Interestingly, he had watched chain-snatching videos on news channels and practised and perfected the same styles to escape from the police — until the Thursday strike landed him behind bars.
‘Lucky scooter’ Prabhakar had bought a Vespa scooter which was his lucky vehicle as he was not caught even once by passers-by or police during the chain-snatching strikes. He had two other bikes which were stolen, but he always used the Vespa.