Bhilai, Dec 25: With the arrest of four ruffians, police claimed to have solved the sensational loot incident which occurred on December 16 in Padmanabhpur area. The ruffians had looted Rs 17 lakhs from a collection agent of government liquor shops. 12 teams of Police made sustained efforts for solving this case. More than one lakh mobile numbers were scanned, 169 vehicles were checked and footage of 50 CCTV cameras was examined for trapping the culprits.
Addressing media persons here at Durg on Monday, ASP (City) Vijay Pandey informed that the accused are identified as Naveen Mandavi (18); Sunil Barley (18); Gulshan Ambade (20) and Chhatrapal Sahu (25), all residents of Durg. They had looted Dinesh Soni, a resident of Bajrangpara, Supela. He works as collection agent of Righter Safeguard Company. On that day, he collected cash from liquor shops of Urla and Potia and was heading towards the Katulbod liquor shop. On the way near Jail Triangle, he was intercepted by four bike-borne youths. The accused thrashed Dinesh Soni and looted the bag of cash from him.
The victim immediately conveyed the information to cops on Dial 112. Police immediately swung into action but the accused had escaped. Police collected information with the help of CCTV footages and conducted technical analysis of mobile tower dumps. Manual intelligence was collected and Civil Teams gathered information regarding the suspects.
The inputs were analyzed under supervision of ASP (City) Vijay Pandey, CSP Trilok Bansal, DSP (Crime) Praveer Chandra Tiwari and SDOP (Patan) Rajeev Sharma. They discovered that Bajaj Pulsar bike of black and blue colour was used by the accused. Police collected information about all such bikes from the showrooms and RTO and found that 87 such bikes were in Raipur, 55 were in Durg while 22 such bikes were registered in Rajnandgaon. Police checked the owners of all these bikes and finally the point of suspicion came upon one Naveen Mandavi of Police Lines Durg. He was using one such vehicle and had got its stickers changed after the incident. He was taken in custody and during interrogation, he confessed to have committed the crime. He disclosed the names of other three accomplices also. The other three – Sunil Barley, Gulshan Ambade and Chhatrapal Sahu were also arrested.
They disclosed that Chhatrpal had worked at Potia Liquor shop and had seen the collection agents visiting the shop between 22:00 hrs to 23:00 hrs for collecting the cash. He chalked-out the plan of committing loot. After looting the money, they moved to the under-construction house of Chhatrapal Sahu in Village Selud and had buried about Rs 14 lakhs after packing it in a plastic bucket. They had kept 3-4 lakhs for expenses. Police have recovered Rs 14.65 lakhs from their possession.