NEW DELHI: In a sensational case of dacoity, eight masked men entered a house in West Delhi’s Moti Nagar, held a 31-year-old woman and her 2-year-old kid at gunpoint to steal valuables and even shot her in the thigh when she refused to cooperate.
DCP (west) Vichitra Veer said that the daring dacoity was reported on October 28 at Moti Nagar police station following which the police initiated a full-scale investigation and caught four of the eight accused, including one who had previously worked as cook there.
The woman, who was shot on her thigh during the dacoity, works at a private company in Gurugram and was working from home on the day of the incident.
“I was working on a laptop and my son was playing nearby. Our domestic help was preparing snacks and the main entrance door of the house was open due to the festive season,” the woman stated in her complaint.
At around 7.15 pm, half-a-dozen masked men, some of them carrying pistols, barged in house and gestured to the woman to keep quiet. They snatched her mobile phone and dragged her to another room where an almirah was kept.
“They asked me about the keys but I told them that it was with my mother-in-law. They then grabbed my son and I pleaded with them to give him back,” an excerpt from the FIR read.
Irked over the woman refusal, the miscreants threw the two-year-old onto the servant’s lap and fired a shot towards the woman which brushed her thigh, injuring her minorly.
“Suddenly one among them came running towards us and said they had found what they needed. Seeing them busy, I instantly grabbed my son and rushed towards the bathroom along with the servant. We bolted the door from inside to save ourselves,” the complaint read.
When the criminals left, the woman dialed her husband who in turn made a PCR call and alerted the police who then formed multiple team to crack the sensational case.
“We focussed on the back route technique to trace the accused people in which we kept analysing the CCTV footage to ascertain the route used by the accused to arrive at the location,” SHO (MotiNagar) Varun Dalal told this newspaper.
During the analysis, the cops came across footage at a nearby petrol pump where the accused had first arrived to fuel up their motorcycles. “The registration number of one of the motorcycles was caught on CCTV through which we obtained ownership details and then continued tracking the accused,” Dalal said.
One of the robbers, Shyam Babu, a resident of Village Budhai Purwa, Gonda, UP was identified and arrested. On interrogation, he revealed the names of other people and later three more people Pankaj Kumar, Rakesh, and Rajender were also arrested.
During interrogation, the accused persons revealed that they all hail from Gonda (UP) and work in different places of Delhi as cook and house-helps in different capacities.
“Pankaj was a cook at the house of the complainant around one-and-a-half-years ago, who hatched the conspiracy with other co-accused persons for the present incident,” the DCP said.
Once they planned the dacoity, the accused involved some shooters from UP’s Gonda to commit the crime.