KUMUD JENAMANI
Jamshedpur, Oct 19: Police succeeded to arrest five more persons, including a middle-aged woman, in the Rs 1.13 crore robbery at Bank of India’s Ulidih branch in Mango.
Beside the arrests, the police have seized four pistols and 52 live cartridges from the cabin of a container that the criminals had travelled in from Patna.
All the five arrests were made from Patna but the firearms and ammunition were seized from the container now lying seized in the Ulidih thana premises.
Those arrested were identified as Rajiv Ranjan alias Pappu Singh (49), wife Nibha Devi (40), Dharmendra Kumar (18), Niraj Bariali (48) and Pramod Bind (37), all residents of Patna.
Revealing about the breakthrough, senior SP, Prabhat Kumar said that a special team led by City SP, K Vijay Shankar had on September 14 cracked the mystery behind the bank robbery case by two criminals — Bhagwat Thakur and Khagendra Narayan Singh.
“As the special team was in search of others involved in the robbery, on October 18 we got a tip of that some of the robbers were planning to flee the country from Patna. Soon afterwards, a team rushed to Patna and having worked hard, it succeeded to nab four of the robbers and a middle-aged woman who is wife of one of the robbers,” said Kumar while addressing a press conference on Wednesday.
The senior SP said during interrogation of the arrested persons, they could know that the criminals had kept four pistols and ammunition in a secret place inside the cabin of the container which was used in the robbery. He said the police today recovered all the firearms and ammunition from the container.
The gang of Bihar-based robbers had on August 18 robbed Rs 33 lakhs and gold ornaments worth Rs 80 lakhs from the Bank of India’s Ulidih branch by taking the bank’s employees and customers hostage.
