The sensational robbery at the Nizam’s Museum in Hyderabad has been solved within a week. The two thieves escaped to Mumbai and lived it up in a luxury hotel before being tracked down. A four-kg gold tiffin box studded with diamonds, a gold cup studded with rubies and emeralds, a saucer and a spoon have all been found from the duo. The tiffin box worth several crores may not have been used by the Nizam, but one of the thieves used it every day to have food, revealed the Hyderabad police. On September 2 night, the gang of two entered the museum at Purani Haveli in the old quarters of Hyderabad through a ventilator shaft. They removed an iron grill and crawled into the tiny space to access the treasures.
The market value of the robbed goods would have fetched them Rs. 1 crore. But their antique value is many times more. After launching a massive hunt, the police first hit a dead-end with hardly any footage of the thieves, who had turned away the CCTV cameras while in action. There are about 32 security cameras on the premises. The men had 18 exit routes to choose from. One camera captured two men getting on a bike and riding away. But it was almost impossible to see their faces, because of the angle and the fact that they were using a muffler. The pillion rider was seen talking on a mobile phone. To track that call, the police went through data from some 300 towers.”All that went waste as the accused had pretended to talk on phones to mislead us, whereas their phones had no SIM,” they said.
The police caught a break when video surveillance in the Charminar area revealed that two men on a bike had stopped after the radiator hit a stone. When an abandoned bike was found in the nearby Zaheerabad district, with a radiator problem, the two bikes were compared and seemed to be the same. The thieves had fled to Mumbai, checked into a five-star hotel and lived a fancy life for a couple of days. However, the thieves were unable to find a buyer in Mumbai and returned, after which they were caught and questioned. The main accused is said to be 25-year-old Ghouse, a professional mason. His accomplice is younger but he was the mastermind. The idea struck him when he visited the museum like a tourist a couple of months ago. The pair had then recceed the place five or six times before the robbery.
