THE TELEGRAPH KOLKOTA | Sunday , July 28 , 2013 | Idol thief arrested OUR CORRESPONDENT Bhubaneswar, July 27: The city police is planning to bring Santosh Das, alias Ghanashyam Das, 35, the main accused in the theft of antique idols from a Jain shrine at Moodbidri, about 40km from Mangalore, to Bhubaneswar. Das was arrested at Srikakulam in Andhra Pradesh this morning. Bhubaneswar police said a joint team of Andhra Pradesh police and Mangalore police arrested Santosh. Sources said Santosh was heading to Bangalore in a bus from Cuttack and he was arrested when the bus reached Srikakulam. “He was produced in the court of the additional judicial first class magistrate in Srikakulam and the Mangalore police took him on a 14-day remand,” said a police official of Two Town police station. During interrogation, Santosh told the police that he was from Bhilai in Chhattisgarh and was trying to sell the stolen idols in his hometown. Bhubaneswar police said Santosh was earlier involved in the Lord Madanmohan idol theft case at Lingaraj temple in Bhubaneswar and another theft case at Jagannath temple in Puri in 2001. “He had been lodged at Jharapada jail in Bhubaneswar for four years but since his release, the Odisha police had not been able to keep track of him,” said a Cutack-Bhubaneswar police official. On July 13, a joint team of Bhubaneswar and Mangalore police recovered three antique Jain idols and more than 1kg gold from the house of Santosh’s father-in-law at Sailashree Vihar here. The gold is believed to have been made by melting some of the idols stolen from the Moodbidri shrine. More than Rs 2 lakh in cash was also seized from the house owned by his father-in-law, Digambar Mohanty. On July 15, Mangalore police arrested Sanotsh’s wife Diptimayee Mohanty, along with Digambar. They also seized gold biscuits weighing around 1kg from them. The 15 idols that were stolen from the Jain shrine were worth several crores of rupees. They included eight dating back to third and fifth century BC and five cast in gold a century ago. The Mangalore police had released a sketch of Das from the CCTV footage of the shrine and information shared by its monks
Posted on: Sun, 28 Jul 2013 08:17:05 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015