: The Crime Detachment Wing of the City Police will investigate the multiple thefts from the safe deposit lockers of the Punjab National Bank (PNB) in the city more than two years ago.
This was after the local police stations failed to make any breakthrough in the investigations in three complaints about the disappearance of gold ornaments from the lockers of the K.P. Kesava Menon Road branch of the bank.
The first case related to the missing of 25 sovereigns of gold from the locker allotted to an account holder, S. Saravanan, in February 2012. The second one was that of gold ornaments and a diamond necklace, that cost Rs.18 lakh, vanishing from the locker leased to Shweta Sudhan, daughter of D. Sali, retired Deputy Commissioner of Police, Kozhikode city, in November, 2012. In the third case, 40 sovereigns of gold owned by a Non-Resident Indian, went missing in December, 2012.
The complainants had already moved the State High Court seeking a probe by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). A verdict on this petition is still pending.
The City Police have not been able to make any headway in the cases despite the investigators examining closed-circuit television camera footage from the bank.
Forensic and fingerprint experts, who took samples from the deposit lockers, also could not provide any clue to the locker thefts.
Initially, the investigators suspected that the visuals could have been tampered with. So, they sent the digital images to the Cyber Forensic Cell at the Police Headquarters in Thiruvananthapuram. But that did not yield any positive results.
Right from the beginning of the probe, the police had suspected that bank employees could be involved in the case. Contradictory statements given by the peon of the bank had confused the investigations.
So they decided to carry out a polygraph test on the custodian of the master key of the locker and his subordinate. A petition was filed before the Kozhikode Judicial First Class Magistrate Court seeking permission for conducting the test. But the peon failed to turn up for hearing.
