Less than 24 hours after an armed gang of robbers decamped with 25 kg gold and Rs 96,000 cash from a Muthoot Finance branch in Hosur, Tamil Nadu, police in Hyderabad nabbed the seven criminals from the Shamshabad area early on Saturday.

The seven, who hail from Madhya Pradesh, didn't know that the jewellery pouches also contained GPS tracking devices that the company had placed in them as a security measure.

Krishnagiri superintendent of police Bandi Gangadhar said the Tamil Nadu police were able to track the loot using GPS. TN police teams tailed the gang and were able to alert the Telangana police early to lay a trap.

The arrested dacoits have been identified as Rup Singh Baghal, Shanker Singh Baghal, Pavan Kumar (all residents of Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh), Bhupendhar Manji, Vivek Mandal (from Ranchi in Jharkhand), Rajiv Kumar and Teak Ram (from Meerut in Uttar Pradesh). Two others — Luiya Pandey from Nagpur, Maharashtra, and Amit from Indore, Madhya Pradesh — who were also involved in the dacoity, are still absconding. Pandey, sold the guns to the others for Rs 35,000 each.
Cyberabad police commissioner V C Sajjanar said all the stolen gold and cash, besides seven guns, 10 magazines, 97 live rounds of bullets, a container lorry, a Tata Sumo, 13 cell phones were recovered from the gang. 

Recreating Friday morning's robbery, cops said four masked men on motorcycles — Amit, Pavan, Bhupendhar, Vivek — entered the Muthoot Finance office and looted the place at gunpoint. Rup Singh and Shanker Singh stood guard outside the office while driver Teak Ram and cleaner Rajiv Kumar waited with the container truck on the Tamil Nadu-Karnataka border nearby.

At the border, the loot was loaded on to the container and Amit, Teak Ram and Rajiv Kumar drove away in the truck. The other five went to their rented rooms, about 10 to 15 km away from the scene of crime, abandoned the bikes and hired a taxi to Anantapur in Andhra Pradesh.

They took the same route as the truck till Anantapur, where the five hired another taxi to Shamshabad in Hyderabad.

Following leads from the Tamil Nadu police, the Telangana police spotted the container truck and taxi. Based on CCTV footage captured at a toll plaza right before Shamshabad, a police team nabbed the men in the taxi soon after they entered the city limits.

"Since we knew that the accused were in possession of weapons, we had to make sure all our teams were armed at every checking point. After the accused were caught at Shamshabad, they confessed to the crime and gave us information about the location of the booty. The container truck was intercepted on the national highway at Medchal," Sajjanar said. Amit fled before the police could catch him.
Prior to Friday's robbery, some of the accused camped in Bengaluru for one month, did a recce of various places and finally zeroed in on Muthoot Finance's Hosur branch.

Police said the same gang made a vain bid to commit a dacoity at Ludhiana in Punjab in October last year and that they had fired 32 bullets, killing one person.

Courtesy: TOI