STRAP: A former employee helped the gang, which was busted after it began spending the loot
Thane: Four months after a doctor couple was looted in Ulhasnagar in a sensational heist, the Shivaji Nagar Police have arrested nine persons, including a former employee of the nursing home, in connection with the robbery.
The employee, lab technician Jyoti Salekar, was the one who provided the gang with all the details it needed to carry out the heist, from the floor plan of the nursing home to the hours that the doctors kept. Based on these details, the eight other accused hatched the plan. The police were able to recover ₹64.71 lakh from them.
The crime had taken place on July 11, when four masked men barged into Usha Nursing Home in Ambernath, locked up the nurses and patients on the ground and first floors, and broke into the house of the septuagenarian doctor couple who lived on the second floor. Dr Usha Lapsia, 71, was alone at that point, and the accused threatened her at knifepoint and fled with the entire safe containing cash and gold worth ₹1.18Cr.
The Ambernath police station team and crime branch worked on the case for almost three months but were bereft of technical leads. For one, the accused had taken the entire DVR of the nursing home CCTV with them, and nearby establishments did not have cameras. The vehicle in which the accused fled was spotted by a nurse but remained untraceable as the nurse failed to give the police correct details of it.
Given the stalemate, the police team began to believe that the investigation would not proceed further. The accused, who had hitherto been cautious, began to relax and spend their loot on unstinted shopping. Some bought new cars or apartments, others invested in money-making schemes and yet others turned money-lenders at usurious rates.
Things began to move again when Prashant Mohite, the deputy commissioner of police, Zone 4, decided to involve police officials from stations other than the one that had jurisdiction. “An investigation team of the Vithalwadi police station and API Harshal Rajput began working on the case, and we formed seven teams,” said DCP Mohite. “We checked details of hundreds of suspects and thousands of numbers from dump data records as well as hours and hours of CCTV footage.”
A police team also started an old-style groundwork investigation. “We activated our entire informer network of Zone 4 areas, where we have around seven police stations,” said an official. “It was then that we started getting details of the accused, who had begun blowing up money all of a sudden. A source provided details of one of the accused, but it was difficult to confirm his part in the robbery, as his phone was switched off for those four hours when the crime was taking place. But officials still tried to get details of the people who were in touch with him, and their call details on the day of the robbery.”
A technical team, after detailed investigation, discovered that around seven of the people being investigated had their mobile phones switched off during the same period. Where did these seven members go in those four hours?
Another idea was thrown up during team discussions: that an insider must have been connected to some of the accused. The police then collected details of the hospital’s staff members, past and present, and discovered that the nursing home’s former lab technician Jyoti Salekar had been fired from her job in February for financial mismanagement. The police team then discovered her in contact with one of the suspects, who was her relative.
After this breakthrough, the cops began getting details of all the accused, and on Saturday, October 15, went to each of their houses at the same time with different teams, and nabbed them all. The accused did not confess initially but later accepted their part in the crime. After this, two more persons—jewellers who helped the seven sell the stolen gold jewellery—were also arrested.
The main accused have been identified as Chetan Dudhane, 30, Harish Ghadge, 27, Akshay Jadhav 26, Kunal Chaudhary, 21, Dipak Waghmare, 42, Tushar Solse, 41 and Jyoti Salekar, 34. The two jewellers are Babusingh Chadana, 28, and Gopal Ravria, 38. All seven accused have one or two theft and kidnapping cases registered against them.