CHENNAI: A bag containing diamond jewellery worth over Rs 3 crore allegedly went missing from the first-class AC coach of the Thiruvananthapuram-Madurai-Egmore Ananthapuri Express on Friday. The railway police have launched an investigation.
The complainant, Deepakshan Shetty (40), a sales representative of a private jewellery showroom in T Nagar, boarded the train at Madurai carrying the jewellery consignment. According to police, he kept the bag near his head before going to sleep in the first-class AC compartment. When the train reached Chennai Egmore on Friday morning, Shetty found the bag missing. He told police he had last seen the bag after the train crossed Tiruchy and realised it was missing only on reaching Chennai.
Shetty first approached the Chennai Egmore Railway Police Station. As the alleged theft was suspected to have occurred before the train entered the Chennai suburban limits, he was directed to the Tambaram railway police station, where he submitted a complaint on Friday evening.
The case has since been registered, and the investigation has been transferred to the Tiruchirappalli Railway Police as the suspected place of occurrence falls under their jurisdiction. A Government Railway Police (GRP) team from Chennai accompanied the complainant to Tiruchirappalli on Saturday, where he was questioned as part of the investigation.
The police are examining the CCTV footage from the railway stations along the train’s route to trace the missing bag. They have also alerted GRP personnel across the Tiruchirappalli Railway Division to check whether the bag may have been discarded or recovered anywhere along the railway tracks.