In a major midnight heist, burglars struck at the Bank of Baroda branch at Kundarapalli here in the early hours of Saturday and decamped with 6,000 sovereigns of jewellery.
The robbery came to light on Saturday morning after the branch manager, Udhaya Bhaskar, found the locker broken. The bank, surrounded by vacant stray houses within a 100-meter radius, had a collection of mortgaged jewellery from over 1,500 customers, each knotted up in separate pouches. Investigation revealed that the burglars had cut a barbed-wire fence to gain entry into the plot housing the bank and scaled a tiny wall of a house abutting the bank building. Of the three lockers, only one was found breached. The other two were left untouched. The stolen gold has been valued at Rs.6 crore.
