ROURKELA: With no fear for the cops, five armed dacoits took a railway engineer and his wife hostage in their house at Diesel Colony and decamped with gold ornaments worth over Rs 25 lakh in the intervening night of Friday and Saturday.
The gang entered the house of South Eastern Railway (SER) engineer Dilip Panda after cutting open the window grill. Their faces covered, they held the couple at knifepoint.
After terrorising them, the miscreants demanded the almirah keys, looted gold ornaments weighing around 400 grams and Rs 10,000 in cash. While leaving, they locked the door from outside, police said.
Before entering the house, the masked dacoits dismantled a CCTV camera near the house between 12:40 am and 1:30 am, and then committed the crime. Diesel Colony comes under Bondamunda police limits.
It is suspected that the miscreants had been tracking the couple since Durga Puja and were familiar with the locality as they had been spotted loitering in the area on several occasions.
Zone III DSP Nirmal Mohapatra said CCTV footage from the area was being analysed and efforts are underway to nab the culprits.
The engineer said he pleaded the dacoits not to harm him and his family and to take all the valuables they wanted. He said his minor son, who was asleep during the incident, remained unaware of what had happened. Bondamunda police, accompanied by a scientific team and dog squad, visited the crime spot to get lead about the criminals on Saturday morning.