Shalimar Bagh dacoity: Suspects yet to be identified

Multiple teams of north-west district are working on the case, but despite having CCTV footage in which the suspects are seen, one of them without a mask, police are still clueless about their identities, an investigator said.

Investigations into the Shalimar Bagh dacoity case, in which five men broke into the house of a businessman in Shalimar Bagh on Tuesday, held his daughter hostage and decamped with cash and jewellery worth over ₹20 lakh, failed to make headway, with the police now suspecting that the five men may be from outside Delhi. Questioning of scores of local criminals has yielded no results or helped the police identify the suspects, officers associated with the probe said on Thursday.

The robbers remained in the house for nearly one and a half hours and ransacked the entire room. (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Multiple teams of north-west district are working on the case, but despite having CCTV footage in which the suspects are seen, one of them without a mask, police are still clueless about their identities, an investigator said, asking not to be named.

“One of the theories we are working on is that the suspects may be from a “transformed version” of the notorious Bawariya gangs as the modus operandi of the five men is similar to that of Bawariyas,” said the officer, adding that the teams are also looking at an Aligarh-based gang that had committed a similar crime in Rohini a couple of years ago. Bawariyas are a nomadic tribe, whose folk have been involved in a string of violent crimes, including murder, rape, burglary and/or assaults, in the states of Delhi, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh.

On Tuesday around 2.30am, five unidentified robbers, four of them wearing masks, broke into the ground floor house of Ramesh Bansal, a businessman dealing in steel utensils, in Shalimar Bagh, held his 24-year-old daughter Arushi hostage, ransacked her room and decamped with cash and jewellery worth over ₹20 lakh that the family has purchased for her wedding.

The robbers remained in the house for nearly one and a half hours and ransacked the entire room in which the woman slept. Bansal and his 22-year-old son Chetan were sleeping in their respective rooms with the air-conditioners (ACs) on, because of which, they did not hear anything and remained asleep, even as the robbers fled with cash and jewellery, the police said.

Explaining why investigators are suspecting that the men are from “outside Delhi”, the officer quoted above said unlike the Bawariya gangs, which usually kill or harm their victims, the five suspects did not harm Arushi. Also, unlike the Bawariya gangs that ransack the entire house, the five only targeted Arushi’s room; particularly the almirah in which cash and jewellery were kept, the officer said.

“There are also several similarities. Like the Bawariya gang members, the five suspects also chose a house close to a park, and cut the iron fencing of the park and scaled a boundary wall to enter the house. In the video footage, they are seen wearing tight clothes, the kind that is preferred by Bawariya members,” the officer said.

Police are also collecting dump data of cellphones active in the neighbourhood at the time of the dacoity. “The scrutiny of the dump data may help us identify mobile numbers that did not belong to people living in the locality,” another police officer said, also requesting anonymity.

The police have not ruled out the involvement of an “insider” as the robbers specifically asked the woman about the wedding jewellery. The robbers took away the woman’s iPhone but left her MacBook. She used the laptop to contact a friend, who in turn called the police control room and informed them about the crime. The woman’s father and brother learnt of the incident only on being woken up by the police knocking on their door.