Investigators have found stark similarity with a robbery at a finance company office in Bengal last year to that of the Ara incident on Tuesday.

They have also got live footage of the robbery at the Ara branch of Manappuram Finance Limited although the six criminals took away the hard disk of the CCTV installed there.

The police detained two persons on Wednesday for interrogation in connection with the Ara robbery.

'The company's head office in Kerala sent us the live footage of the robbery on Wednesday evening. Besides the local hard disk, which the criminals took away, the incident has been recorded at the company's central server in Kerala. There is no need of drawing sketches. The police are now trying to identify the men,' Bhojpur superintendent of police Akhtar Hussain said.

In Ara, the six unidentified criminals decamped with 14kg gold and Rs 1.5 lakh in cash almost in a similar modus operandi eight middle-aged men robbed the Muthoot Finance office at Benachity, Durgapur, in Bengal's Burdwan district in February last year.

SP Hussain said two police teams have already been sent to Burdwan and Jharkhand. 'In the Durgapur incident, 12kg gold and Rs 10 lakh in cash were robbed. Later, some of the criminals were arrested in Dhanbad and a portion of gold was recovered from them. We can say that the gang definitely has inter-state links,' another police officer said on condition of anonymity.

Both the incidents bear similarity in terms of their modus operandi. 'The police are making all kinds of attempts to solve the case,' Hussain said.