HYDERABAD: 300 securitymen. Seven robbers. A six-hour combing operation in a building complex of 710 apartments. The scene last week seemed straight out of a Bollywood thriller, but with an anticlimax. In the end, the robbers—whose loot attempt at a local Muthoot Finance branch here went wrong—gave the large posse of securitymen the slip.
The gang, posing as customers, had gone to the Mailardevpally branch to loot cash and valuables. However, their attempt was foiled by a staffer who set the emergency alarm ringing. The gang somehow managed to escape. Later, the police got a lead that they were hiding in My Happy Home Palace apartments in Rajendranagar. A combing team was formed which raided the complex in the wee hours of July 4.
The team comprising some 300 security personnel was drawn from the police and the anti-terror unit Octopus (Organisation for Counter-Terror Operations). At the end of the operation, they realised that the robbers had escaped. The Chevrolet Tavera they had taken to the Muthoot Finance branch was found in the apartment’s parking lot.
‘Operation Flushout’ began when the building’s watchman saw unfamiliar men trying to change the number plate of a vehicle in the parking lot. The gang fled when they realised they had been identified. The watchman informed the police who scanned the CCTV footage of the complex and confirmed that the men were indeed members of the gang that tried to rob the bank.
Police are now understood to have identified two of the suspects as Banti and Sardar, who are members of the Mumbai-Karnataka-based Arjun Shetty gang. The investigators, who collected samples from the scene of offence and obtained video grabs of the suspects, have got in touch with the police departments of other states for gathering more details about the suspects’ illegal activities and previous offences.