The special investigation team (SIT) of the Ernakulam Rural police has launched a detailed probe into the incident in which 300g of gold and ₹1.80 lakh were stolen by a gang posing as income tax officers conducting a raid.
District Police Chief (Ernakulam Rural) K. Karthik had formed a 23-member team to probe the incident. The team is reportedly piecing together the route map of the arrival and departure of the gang, which pulled off the audacious theft.
While the four-member gang had reportedly communicated in Malayalam, the probe team is yet to confirm whether people from outside the State were involved and that it was a case of the accused being merely fluent in the language.
The probe for the time being is restricted within the State, sources said. It is suspected that the accused may have been familiar with the job profile of the man whose house was hit and may have prior knowledge about the presence of gold in the house.
The theft was carried out by the gang at the house of a goldsmith in Aluva on Sunday around 11 a.m.
Sanjay, the houseowner, originally from Maharashtra but settled here for more than three decades, sought the identity documents of the accused on which they flashed their ID cards on their mobile phones. They claimed that the ‘raid’ was in the wake of a ‘tip-off’ about illegal gold trade.
The accused also seized the mobile phones of the members of the family and made them to sit in the drawing room as they rummaged through the house for around one-and-a-half hours. They said that they were taking into custody 200 g of gold and gold ornaments of nearly 100 g worn by the family members. Besides, they also took away ₹1.80 lakh, bank passbooks, pan card and other documents.
As a ruse to convince Sanjay, they gave a written statement about the ‘seizures’ and told that they could collect them from the income tax office on Monday. He, however, realised that he was taken for a ride when he rung up the mobile number given to him only to be answered by a headload worker.
Since the accused had also taken away the DVR of the CCTV, the police had to access CCTV footage from nearby shops. The four were found to be dressed convincingly as income tax sleuths.
