Don’t purchase their diamonds

July 24, 2007: Two robbers snatch a bag containing diamonds worth Rs 62 lakh from Ketan M Patel, a Dubai-based diamond merchant, near the Pancharatna Building in Charni Road. Four months later, they land in the police net one after another, without being able to sell a single diamond from the loot.
The D B Marg Police pushed the two thieves - Rauf Habib Sheikh alias Bablu and Nasir Yasin Sheikh alias Raja Kida - into a corner by alerting diamond traders all the way up to Jaipur that the two would try to sell the loot.

On Sunday, the D B Marg Police picked up Bablu from Koparkhairane and recovered diamonds worth Rs 36 lakh from his home in Kharghar.

Kida had already been arrested earlier and diamonds worth Rs 26 lakh recovered from him.

“We went to all markets in Mumbai, Surat, Ajmer and Jaipur informing diamond merchants about the robbery and warning them against buying anything from the suspects. If they did, we said they would land in trouble,” said Sub-inspector V Parkar.

Senior Inspector N R Mali said, “After the incident, we zeroed in on the suspects. We knew we would get them soon, but what worried us was that they would try to sell all the diamonds in the meantime. That’s why we took this step to frustrate them. Some merchants in Surat informed us that Bablu and Kida had approached them.”

THE INVESTIGATION

The police, through their informants, came to know that Kida and Bablu were behind the robbery. But finding them was a tough task as they kept changing their homes. “In the past four months, they had changed places 10 times,” Mali said.

Meanwhile, the Crime Branch Unit II stumbled upon Kida in August while investigating a different case. They even recovered some diamonds, but showed them as stones stolen from Hyderabad.

The DB Marg Police, however, were convinced that the Crime Branch had their man and thus took him into their custody. On interrogation, Kida confessed and gave the police diamonds worth Rs 26 lakh.

The police then went looking for Bablu, who kept dodging them by shifting to different places in the state. On Sunday, however, the police got information that Bablu would come to Koparkhairane for some work. They laid a trap and arrested him.

Source: mumbaimirror.com