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Mohali: Gun-toting gang of carjackers strikes twice within 20 hours
Snatches Panipat resident’s Hyundai Verna from Phase-11 market in Mohali 20 hours after a car was looted in Sector 88 in the wee hours of Thursday and later abandoned
Less than 24 hours after a gang looted a car near Purab Premium Apartments in Sector 88 in the wee hours of Thursday, armed carjackers struck again and snatched a Panipat resident’s car in Phase 11 on Thursday night.
With the accused in the first carjacking still absconding, another carjacking in the city has left the police flummoxed.
Notably, the robbery, whose details were made available by the police only on Saturday, is the eighth carjacking in Mohali this year, with four of the eight vehicles remaining untraced.
The victim in the latest carjacking is Vinod Kumar, a resident of Panipat, Haryana, who had come to Mohali on Thursday to drop a relative in Sector 65.
Kumar told the police that after dropping his relative, he parked his Hyundai Verna in the Phase-11 market around 10.30 pm to buy some food. Before he could get off, a Honda City stopped next to his car and four men got out of it.
Two of them suddenly pointed guns at him and asked him to exit the vehicle, following which they drove off with it, while the other two escaped in their own car.
A senior police officer said the same gang appeared to be behind both the carjackings.
“Since the gang had to abandon the first car due to its global positioning system (GPS), it struck again and snatched another car,” the officer said.
The first car, a rented Toyota Glanza, was snatched from three siblings who were returning from a trip to Manali near Purab Premium Apartments in Sector 88 around 2.30 am on Thursday.
But the carjackers abandoned the vehicle soon after at Saidpura village in Sirhind, which police said could be due to the GPS set-up in the car, which made it traceable.
Accused captured in CCTV
A senior police officer, privy to the probe, said the accused in the Phase-11 carjacking had been captured in CCTV cameras installed outside Mohali and will be caught soon.
Meanwhile, police have registered a case under Section 379-B (snatching) of the Indian Penal Code against the accused. “We are investigating whether they had weapons before adding Arms Act sections in the FIR,” stated a cop.
