Engineer pinches laptop, deplaned

Aiports too have their share of kleptomaniacs. An engineer was nabbed by the security forces after he pinched a laptop belonging to another passenger.

Aiports too have their share of kleptomaniacs. An engineer was nabbed by the security forces after he pinched a laptop belonging to another passenger.

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He would have gone scot free but for the electronic eye – CCTV – that played out his action replay for the cops to get his description.

Jayant Chandra Roy, an engineer in Jamshedpur, bound for Ranchi, had boarded a Kingfisher flight (IT-3571) from Mumbai on Sunday. But soon he was deplaned and arrested at Patna on charges of filching the laptop of another passenger.

The story unfolded in true Bollywood style after Shashank Gang, a passenger travelling by Air India flight (IC 472) from Mumbai to Jodhpur, complained that his laptop had been stolen during the mandatory pre-embarkation security check at the Mumbai airport. With both flights leaving around the same time (11:40 am) from Mumbai, security check of passengers was being done simultaneously. It was during the security check that Roy allegedly walked away with the laptop.

When Gang raised an alarm, CISF personnel, responsible for airport security, immediately scanned the CCTV footage and identified the suspect. They alerted their counterparts here in Patna and also e-mailed the CCTV footage with the description of the suspect.

Before the Kingfisher flight landed in about two-and-a-half hours at 2:10 pm, the CISF personnel were ready for the suspect. They did passenger profiling and checked those who alighted in Patna, but did not find their ‘man’.

The CISF personnel then sought permission from the Kingfisher airport manager, who in turn asked the flight captain, before allowing them to board the aircraft. The suspect, seated on 6E, was hunted down in quick time. Though Roy initially tried to fox the security personnel by showing his laptop, as the only one he was carrying, he confessed to having ‘inadvertently’ put the other laptop in his bag, stuffed with clothes.

Station house officer of Airport police station N K Yadavendu told HT: “Roy has been arrested and an FIR lodged against him.”

If the same incident had happened here, it would have been difficult to nail the culprit because the Patna airport does not have CCTV, the officials said.