Bhubaneswar, July 23: Nayapalli police today recovered gold and silver ornaments worth Rs 20 lakh that were stolen from the residence of a businessman in Nayapalli on July 6. They have arrested the accused.

Police said the accused, identified as Rahul Moharana, 32, a native of Berhampur in Ganjam district, worked as a tailor in the area.

“His wife worked as a cook at the house of Madhusudan Nayak, the businessman. She had been working there for two months,” said a police official.

On the day of incident, the Nayak family had gone to attend a birthday party of one of his relatives and they had asked the cook to lock the house and leave in the evening.

“Moharana had gone to pick up his wife but he found the door locked from the outside. Later, he entered the house by breaking open the back door and stole the gold and silver ornaments and cash,” said a policeman.

However police found no involvement of his wife in the incident.

According to the complaint, the stolen ornaments included 530 grams of gold jewellery, some of them studded with diamonds, a kilogram of silver and Rs 4.5 lakh in cash. Though the police has recovered the ornaments, they have only got hold of Rs 26,900 in cash.

“We are investigating about the missing cash,” said an official of Nayapalli police station.

The accused had kept the looted ornaments in an iron box and had hidden it at his neighbour’s house.

Rape arrest

Police today arrested two persons accused in the rape case of a female engineer at Chandaka on the city outskirts on July 18. The police had earlier arrested the main accused, Jitendra Biswal, 28.

The duo, identified as Ranjan Kumar Sethi, 28, and Bikash Sethi, 26, were arrested from Nayagarh district yesterday. While Bikash had been the driver of Biswal’s vehicle for the past three years, Ranjan worked as an autorickshaw driver in the city. Both of them lived together at Chandrasekharpur.

The police said both were hiding in Bhubaneswar and Nayagarh after managing to escape. “All three were known to each other,” said a police official.

The victim had befriended Jitendra Biswal in February through a social networking site. Biswal works as the director of an institute in Bhubaneswar that offers various courses of a Punjab-based university. The incident had taken place after Biswal had asked the girl out on a date.