Four wrestlers held for robbery in Delhi

The DCP said the investigators checked CCTV footage at the spot but the darkness didn’t help obtain any clues.

Four wrestlers, including one who claimed to have won a gold medal in an international championship, have been arrested for robbing a general store after shooting and injuring its employee in outer Delhi’s Rohini last month, police said on Saturday.

The officer said while the other three men were into robbing “for a living”, Lakshay had joined them for “adventure”. (HT FILE)

Gaurav Sharma, deputy commissioner of police (outer-north), identified one of the men by his first name Lakshay and quoted the 22-year-old suspect as claiming he had won a gold medal at an international event in 2017.

DCP Sharma said Lakshay had shot the general store’s employee in his foot for resisting the robbery on June 24.

The others arrested men were Dinesh, Hardeep and Robin, all of them identified by their first names. The DCP said the four are wrestlers, some of them at the local level.

On the night of the robbery, the four of them allegedly drove a Swift Dzire car till the general store and robbed its owner of Rs. 60,000 cash. An employee was shot in his foot for resisting the robbery.

The DCP said the investigators checked CCTV footage at the spot but the darkness didn’t help obtain any clues. So, the police expanded their search to all possible routes taken by the robbers.

“We checked footage from 170 cameras over eight days before we found grainy images of the car used by the suspects. While the registration number was not legible, we confirmed that the wheels of the car had back caps and only one of the two lights above the number plate was working,” the DCP said.

It required more efforts on the ground before the police zeroed down to the suspects and arrested them on Friday and recovered the car from them. They were found to be carrying two pistols, said the DCP.

The officer said while the other three men were into robbing “for a living”, Lakshay had joined them for “adventure”.

“Lakshay dropped out of school during class 12 and has been into wrestling for the last five years,” the DCP said.