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-metre radius, had an accumulation 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.
One locker broken open
Of the three lockers, only one locker was found breached. The other two were left untouched. The stolen gold has been valued at Rs.6 crore.
Security lapses were evident in the bank that had been servicing the area for over two decades, police sources said.
There was no night guard in the bank, and of the five CCTV cameras, two cameras were dysfunctional. One of the cameras along with a dysfunctional sound alarm was placed right at the entrance of the bank. Except for the entrance of the bank that was secured by a sliding shutter, the rear entries were feeble wooden doors and were broken by the burglars.
Arriving at the scene on Saturday evening, Inspector General of Police K.Shankar said that the three CCTV cameras had captured images of three men with backpacks and faces covered with monkey caps. Ten special teams have been formed and teams deployed to Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. Forensic teams and a sniffer dog have been pressed into service.
People who had mortgaged jewellery gathered around the bank even as the police cordoned off the area. The rural branch, located about 20 km from Krishnagiri and barely a km from the Andhra Pradesh border, serviced 53 surrounding villages, with a population primarily of ex-servicemen, labourers, farmers and livestock rearers.
