Motorbike thieves at the Bank More police station. Picture by Gautam Dey

Dhanbad, Feb. 15: One of them is barely 16 and looks younger. The other would be equally young, being a student of Intermediate Science at P.K. Roy Memorial College.

But both of them, if Dhanbad police is to be believed, were ace bike-lifters in and around the coal city and led gangs of teenagers.

But there the similarities ended. While Bhola Giri comes from a poor family, is a school drop-out and took to crime after the death of his father, police claim Piku Sharma belongs to a reasonably well-off family. Sharma’s father is a clerk, one of the brothers a trader and a brother-in-law employed with the public sector Bharat Coking Coal Ltd. And he himself of course was a bonafide college student.

None of the two gangs actually made much money. Police and experts in the trade said that a stolen motorcycle would be sold for as little as Rs 2,000. While the buyer would often sell it at a marginally higher price of Rs 3,500. For motorcycles which now cost upwards of Rs 40,000, the bike-stealers have been selling them for a song. But only because their survival depended on fast disposal.

What’s more, the paltry amount they received by stealing bikes, had to be shared among several gang-members. Eventually, they were left with little money, said the police.

But that little money, besides helping the fire burn at home, was used to buy a fancy mobile or an expensive sunglass or jeans.While lifting bikes, their favourite was the Splendour brand of motorcycles , which, the police said, the gangs found easy to manipulate and start.

DSP (law and order) at Dhanbad, Varun Kumar Mishra, claimed Giri to be the king-pin of a gang active around the Bank More police station area.

There had been a spurt of late in cases of bike-lifting here and the police were registering as many as 10 such cases every week. But the police are yet to recover too many of the stolen bikes or take action against the buyers.