: Two sanitation staffers working at Delhi’s Nehru Memorial Museum have been arrested for stealing a dagger that had been gifted by the Saudi King to former Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru.
Having successfully stolen the dagger on Monday morning — the weekly holiday at the museum — Ram Chander and Sandeep Kumar were unsure where to sell it and had kept it hidden with themselves. The stolen item has since been recovered by the police.
An alert inspector’s observation that a left-handed person may have been involved in the theft helped the police’s elite Crime Branch solve the case.
While that observation greatly increased the chances of identifying the thieves, the crime branch investigators — led by the Joint Commissioner of Police P. Ravindra Yadav — ensured that the precious dagger was recovered before it was possibly melted to obtain the gold or sold to a scrap dealer, thus reducing the chance of its recovery.
Chander and Kumar had been hired as sanitation staffers at the museum, located in Teen Murti Bhawan, in 2008 and 2010 respectively. The police said the duo was deep in debt and hence hatched a plan to steal the dagger.
Since the dagger’s case was plated with gold, the suspects believed that the entire dagger was made of gold and would transform their lives if sold, said investigators.
Monday was chosen for the theft when the museum is closed for visitors. “Sandeep kept a watch on people entering the museum while Chander broke open the door and the showcase to steal the dagger,” said Mr. Yadav.
When the local police failed to crack the case, the crime branch was roped in on Wednesday morning. There were no CCTV cameras installed at the crime scene and two others at vital points were found to be not working, said Taj Hassan, Special CP (Crime).
A team visited the spot to examine and recreate the crime scene. It was there that Inspector P.C. Yadav realised that this was the work of a left-handed person.
“First, the thieves had broken the glass pane on the left side of the door to open the latch and get access to the showcase in which the dagger was kept. It is generally a left-hander who would choose to break the left side of a door instead of the right,” the inspector told The Hindu .
Further, the inspection of the broken showcase showed that the impact of the hit on the wooden frame was running from left to right. “At that moment, I realised that we stood a chance to nab the suspect if we could identify the left-handers,” said the inspector.
Meanwhile, aware of the value of time in such cases, Joint CP Ravindra Yadav instructed his personnel to continue the probe through the night, lest the thieves manage to dispose of the dagger. He himself physically joined the probe as more than 100 employees at the museum were grilled.
“Since there is little physical work for these employees at the museum, the employees were unable to say if they knew any of their colleagues to be left-handers,” said an investigator.
The first clue came from one of the staffers who revealed that 32-year-old Ram Chander, a sanitation worker, could often be seen batting left-handed as well as right-handed while playing cricket in the museum’s premises.
The interrogators shifted their focus to Chander and he allegedly broke down and spilled the beans on their plan and the involvement of his associate Sandeep. “Chander was found to be ambidextrous, that is, he could use his left hand with the same ease as his right one,” said the Joint CP.
Ram and Sandeep were deep in debt and hence hatched a plan to steal the dagger
