Bhubaneswar, May 16: Thieves broke into a teacher couple’s house at Jagannath Vihar area of Baramunda last night, had food and soft drinks there and decamped with gold jewellery and foreign exchange.

The family was asleep all this while.

Surendranath Pasupalak, head of the agricultural meteorology department at Odisha University of Agriculture and Technology (OUAT), discovered the theft when he found the doors to one of the rooms in the house locked from inside this morning.

“It was around 7am and I was getting ready to go for jogging when I noticed the door was locked. I went to the rear end of the house and found the window there broken and the grill removed. Jewellery boxes, a suitcase containing my research papers and other items were lying scattered inside,” said Pasupalak.

A steel almirah in the room was found broken. Gold ornaments and around Rs 1.46 lakh in Canadian and US dollars are missing. Pasupalak said one his son came home from Canada two weeks ago and he had brought the dollars with him.

When the theft took place, Pasupalak, his wife Namita, principal of Biju Patnaik Junior Science College, Badagada, Ganjam, and their son Sumit, who is studies in Canada and is currently home, were sleeping in one room while his 80-year-old mother was sleeping in another.

The thieves had opened the window of the room where Pasupalak’s mother was sleeping. But they did not enter from there apparently because there weren’t many things to steal.

Assistant commissioner of police Jagannath Pradhan, who visited the spot, said: “We have collected fingerprints from the spot. We are investigating the matter.”

Recently, thefts have taken place at Kharavela Nagar on May 12 and Bomikhal on May 13.