Mumbai, March 25: The Dadar police have busted a gang of three burglars, including a modern-day Robin Hood, for burgling a posh Dadar flat and decamping with ornaments and cash worth Rs31.68 lakh a week ago.
“We have succeeded in arresting Rehmat Ali Rangrez, 32, Sunil Jaiswal, 28, and Bheem alias Dhananjay Singh, 27, and have recovered gold and silver ornaments, and cash worth Rs28.28 lakh,” said senior police inspector Ashok Unde of the Dadar police station. The trio was remanded in police custody till March 25 by the additional chief metropolitan magistrate’s court in Dadar on Wednesday.
According to assistant police inspector Jayendra Sawant of Dadar police station, Rangrez, the gang leader, is a history-sheeter known for committing burglaries during daytime, unlike most of his ilk who prefer the cover of the darkness. He hails from Pratapgarh district in Uttar Pradesh, and frequently visited Mumbai, Pune and other areas in Maharashtra for the past eight years to burgle.
Sawant said that Rangrez used to rob the rich to feed the poor of Pratapgraph. In fact, after each robbery, he would visit his native place to distribute cash and valuables among the poor. Twenty cases, including one of murder, are registered against him in Mumbai, Pune, and Bhiwandi, and Pratapgarh in UP.
Singh, meanwhile, has been booked in two cases of burglary in the city, while Jaiswal is a newcomer. Jaiswal was working as a driver for the past seven months for one of the flat owners in Chaitanya Society at Dadar where the burglary took place on March 15.
Jaiswal had tipped-off Rangrez and Singh about the locked seventh-floor flat. The owner, a businessman, had gone to the US while his wife and children were in Goa. The gang’s fate was sealed after the cops got hold of the footage from the CCTV installed on the ground floor of the building. “We identified the two robbers — Rangrez and Singh — whom we had arrested earlier in a burglary case in 2009,” said sub-inspector BK Koyal.
—Agencies