Scooter rider snatches phones of two within a minute, arrested within three hours of crime

The description of the suspect and his scooter, provided by the two victims, helped identify and arrest him, said another police officer.

Riding a red scooter, a 25-year-old man snatched mobile phones of two persons over a 150-metre distance, within a gap of one minute, on central Delhi’s Desh Bandhu Gupta Road on Sunday morning, police said.

Riding a red scooter, a 25-year-old man snatched mobile phones of two persons over a 150-metre distance, within a gap of one minute (Representative Image)

Over 18 incidents of snatching have been reported every day on an average in Delhi in the last two years.

Since the local police realised that it was the same snatcher in both the crimes, and knew the direction in which he had fled, they alerted their counterparts in neighbouring police stations as well as in Kashmere Gate. Police said that the snatcher was caught near Kashmere Gate within three hours of the crimes being reported to them.

Mandeep Singh Randhawa, deputy commissioner of police (central district), said the two snatched mobile phones and the red scooter used by the suspect, Shanky, too have been recovered and he was found to be involved in two previous cases of snatching.

The description of the suspect and his scooter, provided by the two victims, helped identify and arrest him, said another police officer.

The two persons allegedly targeted by Shanky were 15-year-old student Suchismita Panda, and 23-year-old Akhilesh Kumar who works for a private firm.

Panda, who was the first of the two to be targeted, said that she was waiting for an auto-rickshaw outside Big Bazar on the New Rohtak Road, near Liberty Cinema, at 9.30 am on Sunday when the man struck.

“A man riding a red scooter snatched my mobile phone and sped away. But before he left, he turned around to look at me. I can identify him,” she told the police. Panda had noted the suspect’s dress.

But before Panda could recover, the same suspect rode around 150 metres and targeted the mobile phone of another man, Kumar, in front of a banquet hall. “I had taken my phone out of my pocket to check time when a man riding a red scooter snatched my phone and escaped,” Kumar said.

Kumar raised an alarm and ran behind the scooter for a few metres before giving up.

Over the next two hours, both the victims visited the Desh Bandhu Gupta police station to register an FIR. “When they described the suspect, it turned out that it was the same person. We immediately launched a chase and alerted other police stations so that he could be caught and wouldn’t target more people in a snatching spree,” said another police officer.