KOLKATA: In a bizarre incident of ‘robbery’ at a grocery shop in East Midnapore in West Bengal, the culprit turned out to be a rat!
Amal Kumar Maity, the owner of the shop in Tamluk market, closed it as usual on Wednesday night. “Next morning, when I came to my shop around 9 am, I found Rs 13,000 missing from the cash box. I have an employee I trust who stays in the shop overnight. The lock of the drawer was not also picked and its key was in my possession,” said Maity.
He discussed the matter with other traders and considered lodging a police complaint but first decided to check the shop’s CCTV footage. While reviewing the footage twice, a fellow trader spotted something unusual. The time stamp on the footage showed it was around 7 am.
“It showed a rat pinching currency notes from a gap near the cash box, sprinting to a hole in a corner of the shop and disappearing. It came back again and again to do an encore,’’ recalled Maity. The traders found the hole and safely dug out Rs 12,700. “300 is still missing,” Maity said, who is more amused than concerned. As Sherlock Holmes would have said, “Elementary, Mr Watson.”