The State police have reported to the court that Devinder Singh alias Bunty Chor had refused to provide his hair samples or buccal swabs for forensic DNA fingerprinting.
The police said they wanted to verify whether the suspect’s DNA profile matched that of the hair follicles and human tissue crime-scene investigators had collected from the luxury car he had allegedly stolen from the house of a businessman in the city on January 20. The police told the court that the fingerprints lifted from inside the car cabin matched that of the suspect. The police informed the court that on his way from Bangalore to Thiruvananthapuram December last the accused had snatched the chain of a woman at Oloor, near Trichy, and those of two more women under the B 6 and B 7 police station limits in Coimbatore.
The police told the court that they subsequently recovered the ornaments from a cavity inside the air-conditioner of a hotel room the suspect had booked into in Pune.
A surveillance camera image of the intruder had helped the police identify the accused. An inter-State police operation resulted in his arrest from Pune on January 27. The police also recovered the stolen vehicle.
The Cyber Forensics Wing of the State Forensic Sciences Laboratory (SFSL) has used special legally authenticated software to enhance and analyse the grainy surveillance camera image of the intruder. The SFSL would soon state in court whether the image was that of the accused or not.
Investigators said Bunty had arrived in the city in late December in 2012 in a car he had stolen from Bangalore. He stayed in a lodge in the Medical College area and later in another near Ayurveda College. He stole a car from Nanthancode and swapped its number plates with the registration boards of the one he had stolen from Bangalore. He spent most of the time with tourists he befriended at Kovalam. The police profile of Devinder was that of an “obsessive fame seeker” who had a “distinctive” propensity to stage “theatrical non-violent crimes involving theft of property” to get media visibility and easy money.
The national crime information repository’s “fraudsters’ gallery” has Devinder’s photograph on it. Investigators said in 2010, Devinder had “used his notoriety” to gain entry into a television reality programme as “a reformed ex-convict.”
City Police Commissioner P. Vijayan and Assistant Commissioner, Crime Detachment, K.E. Baiju, charge-sheeted the case.
