Noth Indian chain-snatchers held in Salem

Salem: They flew down from Delhi, zipped around the desolate streets of Salem, Hosur and Bengaluru on high-end bikes, snatched gold chains and took the next flight back to the capital. The hi-flying, chain-snatchers from Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, which had struck panic in Salem and robbed at least 300 sovereign of jewels from women in Tamil Nadu, were finally nabbed by the Salem police on Wednesday. The gang had been involved in at least six incidents of chain-snatching and waylaying in Salem city over the last two months.

A routine vehicle check on Salem Steel Plant road on Tuesday night led to the arrest of two members of the way-laying gang, Salem deputy commissioner Prabhakaran told the media. When the police picked up Arjun Aman Kumar Sharma of Ludhiana, Punjab, and Ravikumar of Uttar Pradesh, both aged about 28, for interrogation, their entire criminal operations in Bengaluru and western Tamil Nadu unravelled.

The police have now launched a hunt for their gang leaders, Luckvinder Singh and Rahul, who collected the stolen jewels and sold them in Ludhiana.
The gang’s modus operandi was simple: The gang would fly down to Bengaluru from Delhi. They would hop on to the bikes they had bought with fake documents and drive down the Bengaluru-Salem highway between 3 pm and 10 pm.

En route, the women walking on the desolate streets off the highways became their easy targets for committing a spate of robberies. On one single day, September 9, they committed five robberies. The gang snatched six sovereigns from 60-year-old Subbulakshmi at Ammapettai, nine sovereign gold chain from 59-year-old Gunaseelan of Maravaner, nearly six sovereign jewels from 53-year-old Seethalakshmi and seven sovereigns from 65-year-old Teresamma Illango in the Highways colony. In the wake of the rash of robberies, Salem police commissioner A. Amalraj set up a special team to nab the culprits.

The special police team is likely to leave for Punjab to nab the gang leaders and further probe the criminal network of the inter-state gang. “They seem to have targeted Tamil Nadu as women and men here prefer to flaunt gold jewels despite safety issues,” said a police official.