KOCHI: The mystery of the half-a-kilometre-long missing rail tracks inside the Cochin Port Trust property was solved on Wednesday with the arrest of three persons -- two Kochi natives and one migrant labourer. The ‘who-did-it’ and ‘how’ questions had been doing the rounds since the theft was discovered a week ago.
According to the Railway Protection Force, the theft happened over a period of one month, and the arrested persons had inside knowledge of inadequate security at the spot. The RPF recovered 400 pieces of the rails from the accused.
Binoy Antony, the RPF Station House Officer at Ernakulam Junction railway station, told TNIE, “Having launched a probe into the theft after it came to light, the RPF had sent out feelers seeking information. On Wednesday, we received a tip-off that a tipper lorry carrying the rails was seen in Kalamasery. We followed up on the tip and arrested three persons. We also seized the tipper lorry.”
The arrested have been identified as Thajudeen and Afsal, who are residents of Kochi, and Chandrasekhar Malik, a migrant labourer.
Detailing the operation, Binoy said, “The tipper lorry was intercepted on Aluva Market Road on Monday night. The vehicle was driven by one of the accused. Beside the rails, the lorry also had heavy-duty gas cutters that had been used by the accused to cut the rails. We did follow-up searches along the NDA Road at Kalamassery and recovered additional sections of the rails hidden beneath thick bushes at two separate locations.”
During interrogation, the accused revealed that they were planning to transport the rails to Tamil Nadu and sell it to scrap dealers.
According to the SHO, all three had worked on contract at Cochin Port and were aware of the abandoned rail tracks.
“They knew that the security was lax in that part. The stolen section formed a part of the disused railway siding that once carried coal from the port’s Q9 Berth to the Hindustan Newsprint Limited (HNL) plant at Velloor. The line, which passes by the Tata Global Beverages premises towards the Harbour Terminus, had been decommissioned around 10 years ago.
The entire stretch has been taken over by thick vegetation. There is a huge pile of scrap dumped in the area, making it very difficult to approach the section from where the rails had been stolen,” the officer said.
On the modus operandi, Binoy said the accused entered the high security region through a small gate that opened onto the main road. “The gate had been secured with just a chain and a small lock.
They would unlock it, enter the premises, cut the rails into small pieces, come out through the gate, close it, and put the chain and lock back on. The operation happened so neatly that nobody noticed it,” he said.
