Seven years have passed since the sensational heist occurred on the Salem-Chennai Egmore Express on the night of August 8, 2016. Ingenious in conception and implementation, this crime had the sleuths at their wits’ end for months together.
On the day, a cash load, containing soiled currency-notes with a face value of ₹342 crore, was being transported from Indian Overseas Bank in Salem and two other bank branches to the Reserve Bank of India in Chennai in a parcel van (VPH 08831) attached to the train. The train left Salem Junction at 9.05 p.m. on August 8 and arrived at Egmore at 3.55 a.m. the next day. No one suspected anything until RBI officials opened the parcel van around 11 a.m. on August 9. To their shock, they found a sum of ₹5.78 crore stolen, and a hole in the roof of the parcel van. They were clueless about how and who had stolen the money from the well-guarded parcel van. The police said all the cash was kept in 226 boxes in the parcel van.
No records of serial numbers
Since the serial numbers of the currency-notes were not recorded, the police found it difficult to link any seizure with the stolen money. Investigators relied on corroborative and circumstantial evidence and eyewitness statements to figure out how the heist was brought off on a moving train. As part of the investigation, Crime Branch-CID teams visited various States and examined hundreds of suspects. The police kept a watch on places, such as construction sites, where currency-notes could be used in large numbers.
After two years, the Crime Branch-CID claimed to have cracked the heist and on October 12, 2018 arrested Dinesh Pardi, 38, and Rohan Pardi, 29, of Ratlam in Madhya Pradesh, who were lodged in Guna Central Prison in connection with some other criminal cases. During interrogation, the two admitted to being part of a gang, led by H. Mohar Singh, who belongs to a group of criminals involved in thefts and robberies in several States. At the end of October that year, the CB-CID arrested five more persons, including Mohar Singh, Rusi Pardi, Kaliya alias Krishna, Mahesh Pardi and Biltya alias Brij Mohan. Four of them were then lodged at Guna Central Prison and one was at Ashoknagar Prison, also in Madhya Pradesh.
The main suspect, Mohar Singh, is a native of Khejrachak village in Guna district of Madhya Pradesh. He has no formal education, the police said. The gang, led by him, included relatives and clansmen. They travelled together and committed offences in many States, including Rajasthan, Delhi, Haryana, Gujarat and Maharashtra. In 2006, the Jammu and Kashmir police arrested all of them for the brutal murder of five members of a family that year. Some of the gangsters were acquitted and a couple of them were sentenced. Then, they were involved in murders in Madhya Pradesh. As the local police were searching for them, Mohar Singh moved to south India, along with his gang, and camped at various places in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry before committing the burglary on the train.
Plan and execution
Police sources said Mohar Singh and a few of his associates, including Kaliya, Rusi and Biltya, gathered information about this train route by travelling between the Ayothiapattinam and Virudhachalam stations repeatedly for more than a week. Mohar Singh and four of his associates got on the train (hauled by a diesel locomotive) at Chinnasalem when it was about to move, taking advantage of the darkness at the place where the locomotive and the parcel van stood.
They climbed the roof of the parcel van and cut a hole there, while the train was running, using battery-operated and manual cutters. Two of them entered the parcel van through the hole, broke open the wooden boxes, took cash bundles and wrapped them in six ‘lungis’. The other members of the gang, roughly seven or eight (including Mahesh Pardi), were waiting at the Vayalur overbridge near the Virudhachalam station. When the train slowed down on this curved stretch near Virudhachalam, the gangsters in the train threw the cash bundles towards the others waiting on the ground and jumped out. All of them fled in a van stationed nearby. Importantly, they climbed off the roof of the parcel van before the diesel locomotive was replaced with an electric locomotive at Virudhachalam.
Police sources said eight suspects were arrested in connection with the heist. They all claimed that they had burnt currency-notes with a face value of ₹2 crore after the Union government withdrew the currency-notes in the denomination of ₹500 and ₹1,000 from circulation. The remaining amount is still a subject of investigation as the suspects did not cooperate with the investigators, the sources said.
