Old City jewellers fight off burqa-clad thieves

Hyderabad: In the Old City, thefts by burqa-clad persons have increased. In most of the cases, cellphones or purses have been stolen and the victims do not lodge police complaints unless the value of the item is high.

Police find such thefts difficult to handle as recognising the offender is not easy given the burqa. In the Old City jewellers have been transacting daily business with Muslim women, most of them in burqa, but the thieves have now also started using the burqa to escape recognition.

A jeweller from the Old City, Mohammed Gouse Pasha, said, "We have to keep vigil on suspects whoever it may be without letting on that they are being treated as suspects."

 He said a good trader can guess who is a genuine customer by their action and behaviour. "We never face problems with our regular customers, but we get alerted on the arrival of strangers because we can't trust them blindly," he said.

Another jeweller said almost every jewellery shop has CCTV cameras. But burqa clad women cannot be recognised so “we teach our salesmen to keep watch on customers without showing we doubt them.”

A police detective with the South Zone police said that with the use of CCTV cameras catching offenders has become easy, but detecting lady offenders whether they use burqa or not is difficult. "We can detect habitual offenders from their modus operandi and their body language caught on CCTV cameras, but it is almost impossible if an offender conceals his or her face," he said