Navi Mumbai bank heist case solved, claims police

NAVI MUMBAI: Twenty-five days after a gang of burglars looted 30 lockers in Bank of Baroda’s Sanpada branch, the police claim to have solved the crime.

So far, the police have arrested 11 people, including two women, from Mumbai, Allahabad and Kolkata, among others. The main accused in the case is one Hajid Ali Mirja Baig.

The police said on November 11, the gang entered the bank’s locker room by digging a 30-foot tunnel from a shop nearby, which it had took on rent in May using fake documents.

They stole valuables worth ~3.43 crore from the lockers over that weekend (November 11 and 12), when the bank was closed.

The police have recovered valubale worth ~1.49 crore so far. They recovered 5.5kg gold, ~12.19 lakh in cash, four vehicles and some foreign currency. “It is still not clear who had kept the foreign currency in the lockers,” said a police officer. Four people, who played key roles, are yet to be arrested, the police said.

Hemant Nagrale, police commissioner of Navi Mumbai, said, “Baig had spent ~8.5 lakh in organising this crime and arranging tools and instruments. The gang used walkie-talkies to co-ordinate and was inspired by a similar heist in Haryana, wherein a bank was looted in October 2014. They had watched the video online and applied the same techniques in this crime.”