Gurgaon: Manappuram Finance heist case solved; 4 held, 30kg gold recovered

Police claimed to have cracked the case of a daylight heist at Mannapuram Finance Ltd in Gurgaon after arresting four persons on Saturday, barely 48-hour after the incident.

Police claimed on Saturday to have cracked in 48 hours the case of a daylight heist at Mannapuram Finance Ltd in Gurgaon, arresting four people and recovering 30kg of gold looted from a company office.

Police officers investigate the Manappuram gold heist case, in Gurgaon February 9. (HT Photo)

Investigators are looking for the rest of the gang that robbed the gold-loan company’s New Railway Road branch of gold valued at Rs 10 crore and Rs 8 lakh in cash on Thursday.

Around 2.5kg of looted gold are still missing. Police suspect the loot is with the fugitives.

An unspecified amount of cash was found on the arrested men.

“The accused were in the process of splitting their share and selling the booty. The gold was recovered in 829 sealed packets, so it will be easy to identify the owners,” Gurgaon police commissioner Sandep Khirwar said.

Police are not ruling out the involvement of more people in the heist, though an eight-member gang armed with weapons was caught on surveillance cameras.

The men were not wearing masks — an audacious attempt as they contrived to take away the digital video recorder (DVR) in which the CCTV footage of the branch was stored, an officer said.

DCP (Crime) Sumit Kuhar said the CCTV grabs provided a pile of clues.

“We used social media, activated our informers and found leads from analysis of data to catch hold of the culprits. The photos of the accused helped.”

Some of the suspects have a criminal record. Superimposition of their latest photos with those available with police and analysis of call records of their girlfriends, identified through social media, helped the investigators track them down.

Police are questioning the girlfriend of an accused, who provided crucial inputs that led to the quartet’s arrest.

Four of the suspects are from Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh, while two men are from Haryana’s Jind and another one belongs to Farrukh Nagar in Gurgaon.

Devender, who is believed to be the kingpin of the gang, is from Jind and he had escaped to Ahmedabad with the gold. He was arrested from a luxury hotel in the Gujarat city.

The other three arrested men are Hoshiyar Singh, Vikas Gupta, and Bijendra Singh alias Chabila. They were picked up from a guesthouse at Gurgaon’s U-block in DLF Phase 3.

Their fugitive partners have been identified too, and police announced that they would be caught soon.

An officer said the robbers had carried out a recce at the Laxman Vihar branch of the company in January, but decided to strike at the New Railway Road branch instead.