COIMBATORE: Coimbatore City police are on the lookout for a West Bengal native who was running a gold smithery in the city for allegedly swindling around 1.7 kg of 24-carat gold received from jewellery owners for making ornaments.
The accused received gold in the form of bars from the jewellery owners and went absconding. Bazaar and Selvapuram police registered two separate cases against the suspect under sections 406 and 420 of IPC. Also, they have formed two special teams to investigate the case and to locate him.
The suspect was identified as S Sujith Maity aged around 40 from Howrah near Ganeshpur in West Bengal. He was a goldsmith and set up a gold smithery unit at the KC Thottam area near Chetty Street on Siruvani road in the city.
He operated the unit for the last one year and employed five workers mostly from West Bengal. As he had offered several new designs at low cost, many small scale jewellery owners started to provide job orders to him.
Impressed by his timely delivery and cost-effectiveness, a few of them become regular customers to him and often give huge quantities of gold bars for making as ornaments. Four such jewellery owners including two West Bengal natives, placed a job order with the suspect and gave around 998 grams of pure gold to him on May 16 and asked him to make them as ornaments.
Similarly, R Santhosh (34) from the Selvapuram area had given around 760 grams of pure gold to the suspect on several occasions between May 7 and 18.
After receiving the gold, the suspect went missing on Thursday. While the jewellers visited the gold smithery unit to collect the jewels back, they were shocked after came to know that he went absconded after vacating the unit.