Agartala, April 1: A commandant of the Tripura State Rifles and a DSP who won the Policeman of the Year award for 2007 were booked for theft last night after a widow complained that they had snatched a sacred treasure chest owned and worshipped by her family for 200 years.

Suchitra Jamatya of Nograi village near Amarpur, 125km from Agartala, said officers Manik Mazumder and Pinaki Samanta led 15 armed personnel to her house on Saturday and took away the 300kg iron chest on the pretext of preserving it in a museum.

No living member of Suchitra’s family had ever opened the chest — the woman said her great-grandfather-in-law saw a “divine dream” and forbade his clan from opening it — but they all believed it contained a golden idol of the tribal deity Garia, gemstones, antique gold and silver coins and jewellery.

However, sources said the accused officers — Mazumder heads the 9th battalion and Samanta is the DSP of the enforcement wing — told CID inspector-general L. Darlong they found the chest empty on breaking it open in the battalion headquarters at Baikhora.

They were detained today and are likely to be arrested tomorrow, sources said.

The 15 Tripura State Rifles personnel who accompanied them to Nograi are under investigation, too.

Suchitra, 65, told the police that four generations of her family worshipped the chest twice every day because it contained the idol of Garia, the Jamatya god of war. Her husband, Birbahu Jamatya, had told her the story of how his family came to own the chest.

Investigators quoted her as saying that her great-grandfather-in-law Bodhiram Jamatya’s father was a sardar (chieftain) in Teliamura during the reign of King Birchandra Manikya (1863-1896) and received the chest as reward for helping the monarch curb a revolt by Kuki tribesmen.

Bodhiram, who inherited the chest, saw Lord Garia in a dream and decided never to open it. The chest was kept in the ancestral Jamatya home in Teliamura till 1983, after which Suchitra’s husband was given the responsibility of protecting and worshipping it. Teliamura is 25km north of Nograi.

Suchitra said she was not at home when the Tripura State Rifles contingent took away the chest last Saturday. She filed the FIR the next day. She accused the police of sitting on the complaint until the subdivisional police officer of Amarpur, Harimohan Das, came to know of it.

State police chief K.T.D. Singh handed the case to the CID yesterday and asked Mazumder and Samanta to come to the police headquarters for interrogation.

Darlong would only say that the allegations against Mazumder and Samanta were being impartially probed.

They have been charged with breaking into a house and theft.