A family that had gone to a departmental store to buy their month’s ration came back to find their home burgled in Garfa on Wednesday. A family friend has been arrested and the stolen booty recovered from a dustbin and a rice bag in his house.
Narendra Nath Sen, a resident of Garfa’s Pratapgarh, went to Lake Mall with his wife and son around 6.30pm on Wednesday. They returned home around 9pm and found the main door of the house open.
“I usually put two locks on the door. When we returned that day, both the padlocks were missing. I pushed open the door and went to our bedrooms on the first floor. Both the rooms were completely ransacked,” Sen told The Telegraph on Saturday.
According to their police complaint, the thief had stolen gold and silver jewellery, some imitation ornaments and some money and coins from a steel cupboard.
“It was apparent that the thief did not have to break open the cupboard. This meant he had access to the keys. We got a little suspicious about a family friend who had been visiting our home frequently in the past few days. We alerted the police about this,” said Sen, a state government official.
Based on Sen’s inputs, officers of Garfa police station examined Biswajit Das, 37, a resident of Patwari Para in Survey Park, and found that he had allegedly accessed a set of the keys to the cupboards in Sen’s house and made duplicates.
An officer said Das had been waiting outside Sen’s house for a long time for the right moment. “He saw Sen and his family leave the house and decided to break in. We are investigating if he was alone in the operation. Initially, Das had refuted the charges and feigned ignorance about the theft. On prolonged questioning, he admitted his crime,” said the officer.
Das, who drives an auto, had told the police that he was forced to commit the offence because of a financial crunch owing to a reduced number of passengers every day.
“He claimed that his income has reduced and he committed the offence to sustain his family,” said the officer.
The police are yet to find the duplicate keys that were apparently used to open the cupboard from where the valuables were stolen.