Arindam Sarkar after he was arrested from Bogram on Monday. (Nantu Dey)

Raiganj, Feb. 1: Arindam Sarkar ultimately could not pull it off.

The 21-year-old and his accomplice were arrested last night with a major portion of the Rs 8 lakh that he had claimed was stolen from him in December when he was waylaid by a gang while going to the bank.

On December 23 last year, Arindam had filed a complaint with Raiganj police saying he was attacked and beaten up by two criminals, who also snatched the Rs 8 lakh that he was carrying in a bag, near Dehasree More .

A resident of Bogram, Arindam used to work with Radiant Cash Management, a firm that collects money from micro-credit groups and deposits them in the bank.

North Dinajpur superintendent of police Milan Das said: “At the time the complaint was lodged, Arindam was in the hospital. The investigating officers learnt from the doctors attending on him that he was not beaten up at all because there were no injuries. From that day we became suspicious.”

He added that Arindam had mentioned in his complaint that the incident took place outside the office of a micro-finance company where he had gone to collect money.

But the manager of the firm at Dehasree More near here and other witnesses told the police that though Arindam was found sprawled out on the road squirming in pain, he never lost consciousness as he had claimed in his complaint.

“Arindam had alleged that the incident had taken place around noon and the complaint was filed on the same day at 4pm. But the youth never showed any eagerness to find out if the snatchers had been apprehended and the cash recovered. We smelt a rat and we were more or less sure that the complaint was a trumped-up one,” Das said.

He added that policemen in mufti were deployed from the first week of January around Arindam’s house in Bogram, 1.5km from here, to keep a watch.

The police found out from local sources that ever since the incident, Arindam used to stay put at home.

In the evenings he used to enter a shed adjacent to his house where firewood was stored, the money was recovered from this shed.

“We also came to know that he had been wanting to purchase property. His father works as a night guard at a spinning mill here and they were not at all well off to buy property. We raided his house last evening and arrested him from there,” Das said.

During interrogation, Arindam confessed that he had staged the snatching. He said Gobinda Barman, his accomplice, an employee of Golden Trust Finance Services, a micro-credit firm at Dehasree More, had fled with the money while he pretended to have been waylaid.

According to Das, Rs 6 lakh have been recovered from the firewood shed near Arindam’s house and Gobinda, also a resident of Bogram, has been picked up from his house.

The district police chief said he will ask the micro-credit companies here to tighten their security and method of depositing cash in banks. Both Arindam and Gobinda were produced before the chief judicial magistrate’s court here today and remanded in police custody for five days.