Drama unfolds on EMU near Vandalur
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Chennai: In what seems to be one of the cleverly executed thefts in moving trains in recent history, a man walked away with a mobile phone of a co-passenger in an EMU after staging a drama in which he portrayed the real owner as a cell phone snatcher. While other passengers and police fell for it, the conman walked away with the phone belonged to the teen victim.
The incident happened in a Beach – Chengalpet EMU on Thursday afternoon when Venkitesan, 18, resident of Oorapkkam, was engrossed in his new mobile phone.
The man aged around 25, sitting next to him showed interest in his new gadget and wanted to have a look at the facilities of the phone. Venkitesan, after finishing his morning shift at a company in Guindy, was traveling to Vandalur.
When the train reached Vandalur, he asked the co-passenger to return the phone. That is when the drama started. The other man started behaving as if the phone belonged to him. While Venkitesan kept on requesting him to return the phone, the other man started shouting at him uttering, ‘why are you asking for my phone?’ As the train started moving from the Vandalur station, Venkitesan snatched the phone from him and jumped off from the moving train.
That is when the co-passenger started shouting ‘my phone has been snatched’. Some other passengers stopped the train by pulling chain and half a dozen passengers jumped to the platform to overpower Venkitesan.
They were thinking that they had caught a criminal while Venkitesan kept on telling them that it was his phone and had not committed any crime. People, after beating him up, took the phone from him and handed it over to his co-passenger. They then consulted a policeman in the platform, who advised the passengers to hand over the ‘suspect’ at Tambaram railway police station.
They all along with Venkitesan and the other man got into train and reached Tambaram. By the time the train reached Tambaram the co-passenger had disappeared. The public however, decided to hand over ‘the suspect’ to the police.
Venkitesan then explained everything to the cops who called his parents. His father came to the station with purchase bill of the phone to prove it was certainly his phone. By then, the man who had conned everybody had vanished with the phone. The police later received a complaint from Venkitesan with a promise to catch the man who had taken others for ride.
( Source : deccan chronicle )
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