April 9: Police are yet to identify and track down the robbers who raided a gold loan office in Khardah, on the northern fringe, and fled with cash and gold worth Rs 3 crore yesterday morning.

"We are scanning the CCTV footage of the IIFL Gold Loan office in search of leads about the three-member gang," an officer of the Barrackpore commissionerate said this evening.

A woman customer in the office, who the gang had hit after she screamed for help, received six stitches on the wound on the right side of her head. Doctors at RG Kar Medical College and Hospital, where she was being treated, said she needed to be under observation for a few days.

"My wife told me she feared the gang would have shot her had she not raised an alarm," her husband told Metro today. "A sense of fear and helplessness has gripped the entire locality."

Another resident this newspaper spoke to was still to get over the shock: "How can an armed gang raid an office in one of the busiest pockets of Khardah around 9.30am?"

The Khardah heist came within a week of a robbery at a jewellery store in a crowded Sonarpur neighbourhood, on the southern fringe. The owner of the shop was shot dead when he tried to grab one of the robbers while they were fleeing.

A probe revealed that the robbers were from Bangladesh. The police suspect that the gang was also involved in a robbery at a jewellery shop in Sodepur, 3km from Khardah, in July 2016.

Officers in the Barrackpore commissionerate said they were yet to come across any evidence or hint that the Sonarpur gang was behind the Khardah heist.

"The three Khardah robbers were speaking in Bengali. But going by the way they were speaking the language, it did not appear that they were from Bangladesh. We are, however, not ruling out any possibility," an officer said.

The Khardah robbery was a re-run of what had happened in February when the Park Street branch of the same gold loan company was robbed of gold worth Rs 3 crore. The police are yet to crack the Park Street case.

"The trio seem to have thoroughly scanned the area several times before deciding on the time to enter the Khardah office," an officer said. "The three had barged in minutes after the office had opened".

A preliminary investigation revealed that the gang had reached the spot on a bike that didn't have a registration number. They left the spot riding the same bike.