The building at Fairlie Place where robbers struck late on Tuesday. Picture by Pradip Sanyal

Armed robbers cleaned out the unguarded cash room of a biotech company’s office in the central business district late on Tuesday when one of the owners and a peon were counting around Rs 30 lakh with the door open.

Police said three robbers, one of them brandishing a gun and the other two carrying small sacks, entered Hemraj Mahabir Prasad House at 4 Fairlie Place around 10pm on Tuesday when the building was deserted except for a few people working late.

Shyam Sundar Lahoti, in his sixties, was on the mezzanine floor of one of Pangene Biotech Pvt Ltd’s two first-floor offices with peon Samir Manna, 21, a counting machine and wads of currency notes for company. The duo were sifting through the cash and bundling them in denominations of Rs 1,000, 500 and 100 when the robbers came in, disabled the CCTV and took away the money at gunpoint.

They used cotton to gag Shyam Sundar and Samir and tied their hands. The businessman was also blindfolded.

The disabled CCTV, the only security system the Lahotis had invested in, had been installed in Suite No. 106 earlier in the day.

“The operation was over in five minutes. Nobody else in the building knew what had happened,” the deputy commissioner of police (central), Damayanti Sen, told Metro.

Amit Lahoti (top) and the CCTV that was disabled

The Lahotis — Shyam Sundar runs the business with his sons Vimal and Amit — did not report the incident to the police until 12 hours later. “Our father was admitted to a nursing home a few hours after the robbery. We were more worried about him than the money we lost,” a police officer quoted Vimal as saying.

The two siblings usually stay back with their father to take stock of the day’s accounts but they had left early on Tuesday.

Jawed Shamim, the deputy commissioner of the detective department, said Vimal and Amit went to the office after learning about the robbery from their father but chose not to call in the cops. “They finally filed an FIR with Hare Street police station at 10am on Wednesday,” said Shamim.

Hemraj Mahabir Prasad House, an eight-storey building with over a hundred offices that transact business worth crores of rupees every day, does not have a central security system. Om Prakash Jain, the middle-aged “caretaker” who was sitting at the entrance to the building on Tuesday night, said he saw three young men walking in but had no idea who they were and when they left. “So many people go in and out of this building that it’s impossible to keep track,” he said.

Shamim said the Howrah-based Samir, who joined Pangene Biotech a year ago, was being interrogated but refused to say whether he was a suspect. “This could be an inside job but we can’t point a finger without any evidence. But it does appear that the robbers knew the building’s layout well and had visited the Lahotis’ office before,” he said.