Mumbai: The alertness of a guard at an ATM of a private bank in Mumbai foiled what otherwise would have been a well-executed heist of Rs 17 lakhs police said on Tuesday.
Two men including an employee of UTI Bank's maintenance department were arrested for attempting to rob the bank's ATM at Bandrup in western Mumbai.
"At 11 pm Saturday, Manohar Sadanand Bharti, posing as an employee of the bank, entered the ATM and asked the guard to pull down the shutter from outside, while he repaired the machine," senior police inspector Prakash Jadhav said.
"The guard, Jayaprakash Shivprasad Yadav, told us that after 15 minutes when he peeped through the closed shutter, Bharti had dismantled the ATM and was taking money out of it. He appeared to be confused after some time and was making frantic calls from his mobile phone. On suspicion, Yadav called police," Jadhav said.
Bharti was taken into custody and during interrogation he revealed that his friend Nilesh Pednekar, an employee of the bank's maintenance department, had masterminded the robbery plan.
Pednekar, arrested from his Kannamawar Nagar residence in east Mumbai's Vikhroli, confessed that he had hatched the plan a month back.
"Pednekar had given Bharti a sketch of the ATM explaining how to remove one specific part so that cash could be taken out. But Bharti panicked as he could not take out the print of the statement from the machine, which was needed so that the bank would not find out about the robbery," the police official said.
Police said Pednekar had got hold of a bank identity card and had pasted Bharti's photo on it with an authorised signature, so that he could pass off as an employee of the bank.
Comments
0 comment