Burglars broke into a ground floor flat in a congested residential colony in Thirumangalam and walked away with 110 sovereigns of jewellery and Rs 2.5 lakh worth of diamond jewellery on Monday morning.
The burglars had it easy as the jewellery was kept in an almirah and adorned the idols in the puja room, police said.
The burglary took place at the house of Geetha Ragunathan (50), a resident of Sapthagiri Colony adjoining the Jawaharlal Nehru Inner Ring Road in Thirumangalam.
The burglars targeted the house as she had left for a relative’s house in Nanganallur on Sunday afternoon.
“Geetha’s domestic help Shyamala came around 1 p.m. on Monday to open the house and found the lock of the grill gate cut open and the main door damaged. She came running to me and we immediately went to the house which had been ransacked,” Radha Gopalakrishnan, a neighbour, told The Hindu .
Geetha was telephoned. According to police, Geetha had attended a family wedding a few days ago and kept the jewellery at home.
She was planning to deposit it safely in her bank locker on Tuesday.
She had been living in the rented house for a decade with her aged mother as her husband, a banker, is working in Uganda and her son lives in the United States.
A police team led by Deputy Commissioner (Anna Nagar), S. Xavier Dhanaraj visited the crime scene and carried out a preliminary probe.
The colony has 40 houses and has two watchmen on duty but neither the duo nor the residents heard anything unusual on Sunday night or early on Monday.
