Police hunt for gold in this rat race
Domestic help loses bag with gold; cops recover it in 10 hours after finding a vital clue on CCTV — rats
MUMBAI: When Sundari Planibal, a domestic worker, lost her life’s savings in the form of gold jewellery on Wednesday morning, little did she think that a group of sewer rats would lead to their retrieval 10 hours later.
Planibal had unwittingly given the gold away to a homeless woman as it was in the same packet as some leftover bread. The woman did not notice the gold either and dumped the packet in a dustbin. After Planibal filed a police complaint, a team of police officers scoured through CCTV footage in the area until they found the vital clue: rats dragging a packet inside a drain in Aarey Milk Colony. Cops eventually recovered the packet from the same drain – the bread was nibbled on, but the gold was untouched.
A resident of Prem Nagar near Aarey Milk Colony, Planibal
wanted to mortgage the gold — a set of chains and some rings worth around Rs 5 lakh — to pay for her daughter’s upcoming wedding.
On Wednesday afternoon, Planibal went to work at her employer’s home in Prem Nagar. When her work was done at 2 pm, her employer gave her a plastic bag containing some bread and asked her to give it to a homeless person on her way to the bank located in the same locality in Goregaon east. Planibal, who walked to the bank, put her ornaments in the plastic bag and set off. On her way, she found a woman begging on the roadside with her children, and gave them the polythene bag with the bread — and her ornaments — inside. She realised her mistake only after reaching the bank, 15 minutes later. “I did not know what to do. I ran to the spot where I had found the woman but she was not there,” Planibal said.
Afraid of raising a hue and cry at the spot as someone may find and steal the gold, she rushed to the Dindoshi police station to register a missing valuables complaint. The police officer on duty informed his senior. “Within 10 minutes we had a team in place who went to the spot to look for the woman. After asking several people including auto drivers and passers-by, they found out that the woman lived in Prem Nagar,” said PSI Dr Chandrakant Gharge.
The police team also scanned the CCTV footage in the area. They found the homeless woman and traced her to an area about a kilometre away from Planibal’s bank. When the cops reached the woman, she said that the bread was hard and inedible and she had thrown it in a nearby dustbin.
Officials pored over CCTV footage from three to four cameras until they had a breakthrough four hours later. “We saw some rats drag the plastic bag down a drain nearby. When we searched the drain, we found it. The rats had chewed on the bread but left the gold untouched,” said Gharge.
“I am thankful to the police who recovered my life savings,” said Planibal, a single mother, who has been working as a domestic help in houses in the Gokuldham area for the past 15 years.