In police net, after 40 years

Arrest of Sekharan who was behind many thefts is a feather in police’s cap.

This is one catch for which the City shadow police will be patting itself on the back for quite sometime. The arrest of Sekharan aka ‘Eli’ Sekharan from Parassala on Tuesday has not just thrown light on a long list of unsolved thefts in the city and across the State, but has also wiped the slur off the career records of two policemen who were suspended on charges of theft.

That Sekharan hails from the notorious ‘Thirutti Gramam,’ or the ‘Village of Thieves,’ in Ramjinagar of Tiruchirapalli in Tamil Nadu, and that he was evading arrest for 40 years, has only added to the feathers on its cap.

According to A. Pramod Kumar, Assistant Commissioner (Control Room), Sekharan and his gang, who were masters of the attention diversion tactic, had employed the same strategy in at least five major thefts — four in the city and one in Thrissur — over the past one year.

The biggest of the five, was on April 16, 2014, when the gang hoodwinked the cash counter staff at PRS Hospital here and slipped away with Rs.1.75 lakh. The same day, they tricked a driver sitting in his car at the Thampanoor railway station parking lot and fled with a bag containing Rs.5,000 that was in the car. On April 26, they repeated the trick at Lucia Bar in East Fort, diverting the staff’s attention to escape with Rs.30,000.

The bar theft became a controversy after accusing fingers were pointed at two policemen, who were later suspended. The gang had also stolen around Rs.50,000 from a petrol pump at Pattoor, apart from stealing nearly Rs.1 lakh from a woman when she came out of a bank in Thrissur town. The woman’s attention was diverted by a gang member who chewed a banana and spat it on the woman’s sari when she was not looking, and then told her that there was a blob of faecal matter on her sari.

Mr. Pramod Kumar said Sekharan had led his gang on similar thefts in Delhi, Haridwar, Bengaluru and Punjab apart from in Kollam, Kottayam, Palakkad and Thiruvananthapuram. The gang was quite frugal in their ways, using most of the stolen money to ensure a ‘quality life’ with good homes and to help their dear ones who were in need. A major hunt to track down the rest of the gang is on now.

(Reporting by Dennis Marcus Mathew)