The City police, in the past one month, was twice bitten by mouths that it once fed. Both were ‘specialists’ in chain-snatching – a mode of crime that is now spreading its tentacles in the city dangerously.
The first sting was in December, when the Kanjiramkulam police busted a three-member gang that had snatched the gold chain of a 70-year-old woman. The leader of the gang, Navin Suresh, a 20-year-old from Kuriyathy, and his love interest, Sridevi, had chain-snatching cases registered against them in at least 10 police stations.
While the arrest was an achievement for the police, the fact that Navin was a police informer, supplying the City Shadow Police with inputs on other chain-snatching gangs operating in and around the city, struck a sour note for the cops.
The second sting came last week. Vijayakanth, the leader of a five-member gang nabbed by the Shadow Police, not only brought to nought efforts of the police to reform him, but also used his extensive knowledge of the police surveillance camera network to mastermind the smooth escapes of his gang after chain-snatching offences.
Vijayakanth was nabbed as a juvenile criminal, was given the job of a traffic warden as part of an attempt at reforming him. He, however, used his stint as a traffic warden, mostly at the parking lot in the medical college hospital premises, to gain knowledge on the city’s police camera network and after being divested of the job – after it turned out that he was still involved in various crimes – constituted a gang that was allegedly behind at least 25 chain-snatching incidents in less than a year.
His gang operated in a well-planned style, with Vijayakanth moving around in a car, the others on motorbikes with fake registration plates. The gang leader used to instruct team members on surveillance cameras. The team, once the crime was done, would race to the nearest parking lot, avoiding routes that had cameras, park their bikes there and hop onto Vijayakanth’s car.
(Reporting by Dennis Marcus Mathew)
