Executive engr’s wife, daughter held hostage, house robbed
LUCKNOW : A group of armed assailants looted ornaments and cash worth several lakhs after holding the wife and daughter of an executive engineer of sugarcane development department hostage inside their house in Viraj Khand locality near Sahara Hospital on Wednesday, said police.
Deputy commissioner of police (east), Sanjiv Suman said the executive engineer Yogendra Kumar Srivastava is posted in Meerut while his wife Nisha, elder daughter Jiniya and son Prawar live in Lucknow. He said Srivastava had come on leave for three days and had left for Meerut along with his son at 9 pm on Tuesday . Only his wife and daughter were at home when the robbers struck at around 2 am on Tuesday midnight.
Nisha told the media that the miscreants tied and gagged them before locking them in two separate bathrooms. She said the miscreants easily escaped after committing the crime and the police were informed when her daughter somehow freed herself at around 8 am on Wednesday. She said the miscreants were around 7-8 in number and took away ₹1 lakh cash and jewellery worth ₹7 lakh as well as some ATM cards and mobile phones.
Assistant commissioner of police (ACP), Vibhuti Khand, Swatantra Kumar Singh said the spot examination revealed that the miscreants scaled the boundary wall and entered the house after removing the iron grill of the drawing room window.
He said they overpowered the mother and the daughter sleeping in two separate rooms.
He said as per the victims, the miscreants were not speaking good Hindi and did not know how to operate smart phones. He said their dress code was like migrant labourers and they were well aware about the house geography and other details. “The miscreants even asked about the dog that was locked in another room,” he said.
He said the miscreants escaped after crossing the railway line some distance from the house. He said the modus operandi suggested that they had done recce of the area before committing the crime.
Lucknow commissioner of police (CP) Dhruv Kant Thakur said five separate teams had been formed and the police officials concerned had been told to crack the case at the earliest.
On the same pattern, a tribal gang had targeted the house of district forest officer Ashok Kumar Mishra in the same locality on August 27, 2016. Police had later busted the nomadic gang after arrest of 15 members.