Hakeem Irfan
Two cousins and their friend, who have recently completed professional degrees, planned and executed the robbery within a week. However, J&K police, with acute surveillance managed to crack the case within ten days even when the victim–who repeatedly blamed his daughter-in-law–was clueless about the involvement of his own grandchildren. The three women along with another friend, who had received portion of the money, spent a week in jail and were released on bail on Saturday.
The trio, inspired by the episodes of crime serials on TV and Internet, told police that they believed it was harmless to rob their own grandfather. They thought he was rich and could afford the loss. In an attempted redemption to wash off the guilt, these ‘good bad girls’ also paid tuition fees of one of their friends, who was suffering financially.
This band of well behaved girls with a roster of routine activities, were expected to be moving towards successful careers and a family life, till the time they planned this.
In last week of November, the two cousins called their friend over phon, when nobody was present in their maternal home. They barged into the room of their grandfather, where the safe was installed .. They put this traditional safe into a sack and asked their friend—who, nobody could identify in neighborhood– to take it out and hire an auto-rickshaw.
This is where the police got their first clue. While dragging the safe on the road, she asked for help of a shopkeeper to put it in an auto. He helped in courtesy without questioning what it was and the auto drove away. The two cousins followed in another auto.
“While investigating we checked all the CCTV cameras installed near the house. And one of the cameras had recorded this women hiring an auto. We immediately rushed to the shopkeeper. He claimed that he didn’t knew the women. He was innocent, but out of suspicion, he had noted down the registration number of auto on a newspaper. From this we managed to track the auto rickshaw owner,” a senior police official, who was part of the investigation told ET.
The auto rickshaw driver informed police that he dropped the passenger in a lane behind Kashmir University, near a famous school. The police sought the CCTV footage from the institute, which corroborated the statement of auto driver, as the trio could be seen getting down from the autos and trying to break the safe.
“The footage shows a lot of people passing through the lane, while the three girls are trying to break the safe but nobody is questioning them. Probably they didn’t find anything suspicious considering these were women and would be doing their own job,” the police official said
This is when police asked the victim to identify the three girls, two of whom turned out to be his granddaughters. They had shared the money and then carried the empty safe on a Scooty and dumped it in Dal Lake from Fore Shore road, to destroy the evidence. They also burnt the revenue papers of land and several cheques that were in the safe.
One cousin gave her share of money to her friend to start his own business, another kept the money in her wardrobe, while third friend, had asked the two cousins not to contact her ever again.
“They confessed after two or three days. I had requested the complainant that there is no sign of forced entry into the house, so he should first try to help with the list of people within the family and those who visited him recently. But he only pointed fingers at his daughter in law and insisted on a rigorous investigation against her. She turned out to be innocent,” said the official. The case has been registered at Rainawari police station with FIR number 111/2017.
