Three 19-year-old youth, including the son of a Tamil Nadu woman police officer, were arrested for stealing mobile phones and accessories from a showroom on Saturday night.
Superintendent of Police (North) S Ramaraj said police arrested Yuvaraj (19), Shakthi alias Shakthiswaran (19) and Prabhu (19), hailing from Krishnagiri district of Tamil Nadu. Yuvaraj and Shakthiswaran are drop-outs of engineering and B Sc computer science courses respectively, while Prabhu worked with a private water purifier firm in Puducherry.
Incidentally Yuvaraj, who hails from well-to-do family, came to Puducherry after stealing a laptop from the engineering college in Coimbatore, where he was studying. Similarly Shakthi, son of a Tamil Nadu woman police officer, escaped from Coimbatore after borrowing Rs 15,000 from friends. Both reached Puducherry to see their schoolmate Prabhu, who was staying at a lodge near a mobile phone showroom near the bus stand in Maraimalai Adigal Salai.
S P Ramaraj said that the lure of a lavish life led the three youth to steal the phones, following which the trio left to various places to sell the loot. Police arrested them after they returned to Puducherry and recovered 51 new cell phones, 36 used cell phones of customers for servicing, 220 batteries, one FM player, 4 MP3 players, 4 card readers. The worth of recovered items stood at about Rs 2 lakh. The youth were produced before the Judicial Magistrate II Uthamraj, who remanded them to judicial custody.
It may be recalled that police had arrested an engineering student from government quarters at Lawspet in August and recovered 10 country-made bombs and 8 knives, kept in the almirah of the B Tech student’s residence. The engineering student Udayakumar(20) was incited by the rowdies, who befriended him and allegedly offered huge sum of money.