Spooking occupants - new strategy of burglars to force them vacate homes

NEW DELHI: Evidence suggests that burglars have been using a new modus operandi wherein they spook occupants of the ground floor of residential buildings and force them to vacate the house.

This way, the coast becomes clear for them to break into flats situated on upper floors and escaped unnoticed by neighbours.

Zohra had recently shifted to a small ground floor apartment in Okhla Vihar of Jamia Nagar, with her husband Ali. A driver, Ali is often out for long tours. For some days, everything had been going smoothly, until Zohra noticed suspicious activities around the house one night. She noticed someone peeping into her room from the window when her husband was away. Someone also used to knock on the door at odd hours of the night. Zohra was scared to open the door because in some instances she found no one outside. Such scary occurrences happened only when her husband was not at home. “It was a scary experience. I got worried when my wife called up and told me that someone had locked the door from outside. She even saw someone peeping from the window at night. They had been keeping an eye on me and as soon as I went out they scared my wife,” said Ali.

He then called on the residents of the building for help and took their phone numbers so that he could ask someone to help his wife in case of emergency. “I was forced to shift when the incidents kept on happening. I had no option,” said Ali, who now lives in another building in the same area. Days after Ali left, incidents of theft were reported from the building. A new high-end motorbike was stolen from the parking area a few days ago.

“Earlier, we didn’t take it seriously. Now we see a connection; the ground floor residents were scared away by the burglars so that they could enter the building through their house without any resistance,” said a resident of Ali’s previous building. A similar modus operandi was reported in the incident at Rahat Apartment in South East Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh, where burglars fired at the care taker on the ground floor apartment.

“Before the actual burglary attempt and firing incident occurred, someone used to regularly keep ringing my doorbell in the afternoon. When we would step out, we would find no one. We see a connection now. They were perhaps the burglars who had been checking our response time before they finally struck,” said Javed, an advocate who resides in the apartment next to the one where the burglars attempt a break in.