Telangana: Elderly couple too good for snatcher

Hyderabad: An elderly couple’s brave attempt at thwarting a chain snatching helped the Rachakonda Police nab a notorious chain-snatcher known to be involved in at least seven cases. On November 17, farmer P. Darshan, 67, and his wife Balangani, 62, were on their way home on their scooter when a man named Manoj Swain from Odisha began following them. As they were passing by a rice mill, Manoj ram-med into their scooter from behind, with his bike. This caused the couple to fall off their vehicle. Before they could recover from the shock, Manoj began walking towards Balangani.

“I crawled towards him on my knees and caught hold of him by the waist to stop him from approaching my wife, but he managed to reach her. Because I was holding on to him tightly, he began hitting me on my shoulder and back with something wrapped in a cover,” Mr Darshan said. Meanwhile, as her husband was trying to fight Manoj, Balangani attempted to cover up her jewellery with her saree. “But he slid his arm in and tried to pull her chain off. She held on to tightly, because of which only a part of it bro-ke and fell into his hands. He then slipped away into the bushes, leaving his bike and his weapon behind,” Mr Darshan added.

The police were able to use the bike and the weapon, which turned out to be a country-made firearm, to track Manoj down. Mahesh Bhagwat, the Commissioner of Rachakonda, said that Manoj attacked a constable named Srinivas with a button knife when he was being nabbed. He was finally arrested in Nagaram village. “One button knife and four live cartridges were recovered from him. We also recovered 6.5 tolas of gold from his home and a three-tola gold chain that he had mortgaged to Muthoot Finance,” Mr Bhagwat said. The property recovered is worth Rs 4 lakh in all.

After Manoj’s arrest, the police found that he and two others – Anil and Hakeem – both of whom hailed from UP, were involved in the commission of offences using a bike stolen from Secunderabad.