Cash and jewellery worth Rs 10 lakh were stolen from Rachana Banerjee's Panditiya Road flat on Saturday, with the needle of suspicion pointing at her maid who has gone missing and whose particulars the actress and TV show host does not know.
Rachana had forgotten to lock the door of her bedroom, where the valuables were kept, when she left with her eight-year-old son Praneel for his abacus class around 5pm on Saturday. The full-time maid, Sabita Mondal, was alone in the flat then, according to the police complaint lodged by Rachana.
When Rachana - at one time mainstream Tollywood's heroine number one, who has also acted alongside the Big B - returned around 9pm, she found the front door of her second-floor flat at Palazzo, near Triangular Park, ajar. The 40-year-old maid, who had been working in the household for a year and a half, was missing.
Police said one of the 45 CCTV cameras in the housing complex that has 50-odd flats has captured Sabita walking out of the main gate with a big white bag, unchallenged by the three security guards there, around 20 minutes before Rachana and her son returned.
The drawer of a cabinet in the bedroom, in which the actress had kept the money and jewellery, was open. The drawer was not locked. The keys to a cupboard, in which more cash and jewellery were kept, was in the same drawer but the thief did not touch them.
Rachana's complaint with Lake police station states that Rs 2 lakh and jewellery worth Rs 8 lakh were stolen from the drawer.
"I now realise Sabita was waiting for the day I would forget to lock my bedroom. She got her opportunity on Saturday," said Rachana, the face of the TRP-topping Zee Bangla show Didi No. 1.
Within minutes of the theft being discovered, the actress alerted the police but like most people in the city, she failed to give the help's particulars to the police.
She had not submitted to the police station the "domestic help profile form", which would have contained, apart from a photograph of the help, her/his age, permanent address, physical description and distinguishing marks. According to the police, only around 10 per cent of the people submit the form.
Rachana could only give the cops the number of Sabita's cell phone but it was switched off.
"Rachana Banerjee has just been able to tell us that the maid was from Kalna in Burdwan. But even that information was based on what the maid had told her. We have questioned the guards who were on duty on Saturday evening and alerted the police stations in and around Kalna," an officer of Lake police station said.
Rachana did not have a photograph of Sabita till Sunday. She finally managed to get one from a friend, to whose house party she had taken the maid to look after Praneel. The picture has been handed over to the police. Sabita had earlier worked at the flat of Rachana's next-door neighbours.
The police said tracking down an absconding help takes a lot of time if his/her address is not known. "The chance of recovering stolen articles depends on how fast we arrest the accused. After committing the crime, the culprits always try to sell the valuables," the officer said.
