The wild goose chase by the city police for the gang that looted several lakhs of rupees from two banks in the city took a new turn with police getting a video grab of one of the suspects.
Police swung into action immediately after the OMR robbery on January 23 and by February 18 had narrowed down several hours of footage from more than 100 banks to just a few hours showing the same man walking suspiciously in four or five banks.
“We showed the clippings to the eyewitnesses of the OMR bank robbery on February 19 and they confirmed that they had seen the man during the heist. Before we could run a search for him the same gang struck at the Kilkattalai bank the next day,” said a senior police official.
With nine special teams working on the case, instructions have been given to policemen to comb all the lodges in the city and houses recently rented in suburban areas.
“We are printing posters with the photograph of the suspect and we plan to put it up places like shopping malls, railway stations and bus stops where people gather in large numbers. Most of autorickshaws will also have the posters stuck on them so it won’t escape the public eye,” said P. Thamaraikannan, additional commissioner, law and order.
To prevent such incidents from recurring, the city police also plans to link phone lines and CCTVs of banks with police stations.
“Police will check banks under their jurisdiction and ensure that CCTVs are installed. Cops in civil clothes have also been deployed to monitor the banks,” said the police official.
Surveillance facilities missing in many branches
More than 418 branches of PSU banks in the city lack even the basic surveillance facilities, not even having closed circuit television, thus pose a big security threat to their customers and staff.
The Reserve Bank of India had outlined security norms, including CCTVs, burglar alarms and armed guards, for all bank branches as early as 2009. However, most PSU bank branches continue to flout these norms citing red tapism.
“Unlike private sector banks, nationalised banks have a series of approvals even for the grant of a CCTV,” said a senior PSU bank official who did not wish to be identified.
“As RBI norms are only advisory and not mandatory, each branch has to put in an individual request for grant followed by tenders, tabulations and bid evaluation procedures,” he said.
Police discount such arguments as silly. “If a senior bank official has the authority to grant up to Rs 5 lakh loan in his branch, can’t he spend even Rs 10,000 for the safety of his branch?” asked a senior police official.
With security cameras available for as little as Rs 3,000 and the whole exercise costing less than Rs 1 lakh per branch, the police are baffled by the lackadaisical attitude of banks.
Migrant labourers need to be tracked, say cops
With more and more migrant labourers coming to the city in search of jobs, the police are finding it extremely difficult to keep a tab on them.
Providing security to people from other states is a key concern, but police are sent on a wild goose chase every time a migrant labourer is involved in some crime.
Most employers do not have any details about the migrant labourers they hire and the police are clueless about where to look for an offender.
As the gang that looted money from two city banks at gunpoint conversed mostly in Hindi, the city police has been talking to its North Indian counterparts and trying to ascertain if crimes with the same modus operandi has occurred anywhere before.
The police have also warned contractors who bring in migrant labourers from other states to work in the city to maintain a registry of all labourers.
“It could be students who come from other states to study here or it could even be people with respectable jobs who carried out this heist. However, we are also not ruling out the possibility that they could be migrant labourers,” said a senior police official.
Police teams have gone to other states to conduct investigations and pictures of the suspect have been sent to North Indian states for identification.
“Migrant labourers are not TN’s problem alone as all states face it at some point. After the recent economic development, people have started coming here in search of jobs and it is impossible to keep track of everyone.” laments the officer.
