Virudhunagar district police have arrested three persons involved in burglary at a house in Tiruthangal and recovered 40 sovereigns from them.
In a statement, Superintendent of Police K. Feroze Khan Abdullah said that K. Mohammed Rafiq, 29, of Tiruppur and M. Bharakumar, 36, of Sathyamangalam, were arrested by a special team. They stole 58 sovereigns of gold jewellery from the locked house of Ethiraj in Lakshmi Nagar in Tiruthangal on January 5.
Sivakasi Deputy Superintendent of Police S. Dhanan Jeyan said that laborious work in sifting through numerous video footages of CCTV in several districts led to a breakthrough in the case.
The police said the two men, who had several criminal cases pending against them, mostly in western districts, came to Virudhunagar through the third accused, Niruban Chakravarthi, 34, of Aruppukottai through their acquaintance in jail.
Earlier, they bought a car in Kerala and came to Virudhunagar. After stealing a motorbike in Sivakasi, they roamed around various places in the district and also neighbouring Paramakudi. After failures in all those places, they finally struck at the house in Tiruthangal.
“The registration number of the bike was recorded by an automatic number plate recognition camera and from there we started to track the bike through CCTV cameras,” the DSP said.
Meanwhile, the police found that they had abandoned the bike and had switched to the car. The police identified the car along with one of the accused through the camera in a toll plaza. They got their identity also through the photograph taken by the owner of the car in Kerala who had sold it to them.
Even as Virudhunagar police alerted the Erode police, the latter arrested them in one of their cases.
The two accused were taken into custody from jail and they confessed their crime. The police recovered the stolen valuables from a hideout in Aruppukottai.
